Constitution

By: Nick Webb

Narrated by: Greg Tremblay

Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's Summary

The year is 2650. Seventy-five years ago, an alien fleet attacked Earth. Without warning. Without mercy. We were not prepared. Hundreds of millions perished. Dozens of cities burned. We nearly lost everything. Then the aliens abruptly left. We rebuilt. We armed ourselves. We swore: never again. But the aliens never came back. Until now. With overwhelming force the aliens have returned, striking deep into our territory, sending Earth into a panic. Our new technology is useless. Our new ships burn like straw. All our careful preparations are wasted. Now only one man, one crew, and the oldest starship in the fleet stand between the Earth and certain destruction: ISS Constitution.

©2015 Nick Webb (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Too derivative

The opening of this book felt like the author watched the newer Battlestar Galatica and decided to put a little of their own spin on it. Its not a bad book, just extremely obvious.

Derivative, familiar

Nick Webb must watch the same TV shows I do. I also try to write, but when I find myself drifting too close to an idea someone has already used, or just flat out copying the idea, I stop and start over. Webb doesn't have that filtering process. He borrows pretty liberally from Battlestar Galactica, Ender's Game and little from Star Trek (A starship engineer named Scott? Sure! I'll just make her female!) before adding any twists and turns to make the story his own. Really, I thought I was listening to an alternate take on BSG for about half the book as I could almost assign book characters to TV characters one to one. The bummer with this take is the "Adama" (Grainger) is not as inspiring. He's just a blow hard who really shouldn't be as good at space navy tactics as *SPOILER* he may turn out to be.

Once the "borrowing" of familiar groundwork was done, I like he story itself and may continue with the series if they are on sale.

Battlestar Galactica on steroids

Loved this, being an old school Battlestar Galactica fan I immediately saw the heavy influence in the first part of the book. Old carrier about to be decommissioned, drunk 1st officer, battle hardened stubborn commander, what appears to be a tech heavy race bent on destroying earth, etc. However the story takes a different path than BG, in a very interesting way. Definitely found myself listening for hours on end, I couldn't get enough. I hope audible and the author add more books in this series soon. Cannot wait to hear the next chapter in this saga! Great performance by the reader as well, highly recommended.

I'm not sure what to think about this one..

Any additional comments?

Ok first off i just want to say that the beginning of the book felt a lot like Battlestar Galactica. The similarities are too numerous and too close to get over. On the other side I absolutely love Battlestar Galactica. It's one of my favorite stories, so no big deal right? ...kind of. I couldn't stop listening to the audiobook. The performance was excellent. 5 stars. It fit the genre i was looking for perfectly so i had no complaints there. Except for the details. I feel like the similarities to Battlestar Galactica could have been avoided and the story would have felt just as good because it really was just in the details. I mean how many other sci fi stories are at least a little similar to BSG...more than a few. I'm going to keep my eye on the series and see how the second book goes. Not trying to spoil anything but a few of the similarities between this and BSG may not be there in the other books. So it might be something I can look past. Sorry about the rambling folks. Hope this review helps. There's a lot of negativity about this book and i will say it deserves a bit of it, but I think if you can get past it this story could go places. Give it a chance if you're on the fence. Form your own opinion.

Very enjoyable and fast paced ride

What made the experience of listening to Constitution the most enjoyable?

So a lot has been said about this being a Battlestar Galactica re-hash, and yes similarities exist and some inspiration was probably drawn from it. That said this is a story on its own and the similarities stop at the Captain and EXO's personalities and failings.
Well worth the purchase of a SCI-FI Opera Fan.
This story has legs and can go places in the seat of you pants suspense and fast paced story line category.

Did Greg Tremblay do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

Overall as the majority of characters are male he does reasonably well - especially with the gruff personalities he portrays. Though he seriously lacks in the portrayal of the female characters like Shelby Procter

Any additional comments?

Keep it up Nick Webb- though take some time developing the suspense some more.
Delve some into the science and the limitations of fleet - create more intrigue with the government, the Russians and Swarm.
Throw in a view curve balls and you have a good recipe.

NOTHING FANCY, JUST THE TRIED AND TRUE

WHY MAKE FRIENDS, WHEN THEY WILL INEVITABLY DISAPPOINT YOU?
Ender's Game, Star Trek and even a shout out to War Of The Worlds was included in this book. I read the reviews and knew before a bought this, that the book was not real original. I had no problem with that, as most books are a repeat of old themes. Plus I like all those shows. I wish they would have warned me about how cliché the whole books is. It seemed to me that they took the script from several movies and shows, added all the cliché military lines they could think of, stuck them in a computer and told the computer to write a novel.

Nothing happened in the first three hours. A lot of authors, especially for smaller books will start with a battle event or spotting the aliens or anything with some excitement to it. Nick spends three hours setting up his universe. When the action starts the main character proves his cowardliness, by following orders to save some politicians over 30 children. He proves his manhood by making a thinly veiled sarcastic remark to the politician.

Did you know that in the future, the cold war will still be going on. That the British will be in space along with the Americans and the Russians. The Chinese, Japanese , French or anyone else will not be in space. At least in the first four hours there was no mention of them.

This is not a bad book, nor is it a good book. It just is. For me, I got down on it and just could not like it. Every time the characters spotted off some cliché line or tried to curse, it came out sounding silly to me. I don't know if it was the writing or the narrator, but I thought they sounded like a bunch of seventh graders trying to sound tough.

Unoriginal and inconsistent

I’m confused. The aliens can travel from the edge of the solar system to the moon in just over an hour, but the time to get from the moon to earth takes, what seems like hours.

formulaic sci-fi

Sooo very very predictable. Platitudes, cliches, and plot sequences basically lifted from other works made for boredom if it wasn't so laughable.
All this smothered in quantum gibberish to try to make it more palatable.

Disappointed

Pop corn space opera, I love a good sci-fi story, this was to simple, very quick paced, maybe to fast. Narration was less then desired. Characters are very predicable. Oh well, will try to find something with a little more depth.

Comfortable TV trope, science illiterate

Read the book and bought the audio book and sorta enjoyed the warm predictable TV script from the last century.
Makes BSG look well researched. Enough

excellent space opera

Any additional comments?

This is a well constructed and relatively light Sci fi space opera. Interesting and convincing plot. I have read everything over the last 50 years and I can commend this book to future readers. It's not earth shattering such as early Niven (Ringworld) or late A.C. Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama) or more recently the fabulous James A Cory; however in accordance with contemporary Sci fi: it scores 5* because it's up there with the best of John Ringo (as sole author), any of Ryk Brown, B V Larson or Joshua Dalzelle, but not quite as good as the best of John Scalzi. To the author - we need less fighter jocks, heavier Sci fi, larger galactic range, more humour, a complex romantic interest and a greater use of polysyllabic words (I take it that you are writing for adults? In which case I like to learn something from every chapter. I should also add that Greg Tremblay did a superb job, I actually liked his strange Scottish accent - trust this assists. R

Bad copy of battlestar galactica

If you do not like battlestar galactica do not buy did as it is a badly written copy , if you like battlestar galactica do not buy this as you will hate it

Excellant, Going start to finish

Some strong similarities to the Battlestar Galactica story yet different in everyway that matters, gripped hold of me and would not let me go start to finish.

Fantastic space opera

Where does Constitution rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Just finished listening to this book with tears streaming down my face as the climax and finish is very emotional as the writer has embroiled you into the main character of the Constitutions captain. The books finish leaves quite a few questions unanswered which I do hope means that we will be presented with a sequel to this novel, if so cannot wait. Give us more.

A confused storyline ruins the immersion

The book centers around the Captain of a ship being decommissioned. We hear his thoughts as he comes to accept the decommissioning, only to then immediately change his mind overnight. A huge proportion of the story goes over how he does everything he can to make the life of the people responsible for decommissioning as difficult as possible, without any real motivation being revealed. We don't understand why he changed his mind so rapidly and why he's willing to be potentially face Court Martial over something that he initially seemed accepting of.

Unfortunately this conflict makes up such a huge proportion of the book, despite it becoming completely irrelevant when the aliens arrive. Why subject us to all that completely irrelevant bickering between two officers? Seems a waste of pages.

Once you get past all of that, the last roughly 3 hours of the audiobook is actually interesting. The problem is that it asks you to suspend disbelief after your immersion has been essentially wrecked by the idiosyncratic writing beforehand.

Not very original. But entertaining

This definitely takes a lot of ideas from Battlestar Galactica, It gets uncomfortably close very often in the first half of the book. Second half on the other hand is nearly all action, and is well written, gripping and very entertaining. So overall I enjoyed it and look forward to the second book.

Loved it

I get the Battlestar Gallactica comparisons of a lot of reviewers. A really good story.

Feeble space opera

Unfortunately nothing even vaguely original here. The story plods along but every battle is the same, every character you have seen before. If you have read a lot of this type of book I would look elsewhere as there is nothing to excite in this book. I won't be buying any more in the series.

good

really enjoying the book and can't wait for the next book hope its as good as this one

Amazing

very similar to BSG in the beginning bu the action realy ramps up and the swarm is far scarcer than cylons