Progeny

By: Ray Jay Perreault

Narrated by: Christopher M. Allport

Length: 1 hr and 1 min

Publisher's Summary

The civilization was progressing well. It was growing and it was following the laws. Helen was following the third law to expand their knowledge and the fourth law to maintain variation in their thoughts. She started following an interesting piece of information and soon discovered a past that her civilization had forgotten. She found a past that would change everything in their society and challenge their very existence. What she was going to learn would set the stage for new life and ultimately a difficult confrontation.

©2015 Raymond J Perreault (P)2016 Raymond J Perreault

Progeny

What was one of the most memorable moments of Progeny?

I listened to the audiobook and at at first it seemed like the narrator was very monotone. Then as the story went on I realized that the characters were supposed to sound monotone and speak very technically because they were robots. Once I came to this realization the story became much more interesting.

Excellent short!

Very cool short story about machines discovering their origins of being created by an organic life form that had to flee their planet. I'm hoping the author has more to come in this series!

How to shock an AI

The 4 laws of conformity have maintained a functional society for generations: 1) Continue making units; 2) Protect all units already made; 3) Expand the knowledge base; and 4) Maintain variation in thought. Helen strives to follow the last 2 laws in her scientific studies.

I quite enjoyed this tale of non-organic beings and their well-organized society. Helen and Lorenzo often join Eve and Roberto for dinner and discussion. Helen is a bit fascinated by the local DNA-based life forms, but the topic is considered a bit gauche. Nevertheless, Helen and her lab assistants (Ivan and Lorraine) want to continue their observations.

What Helen and her assistants discover is rather disturbing to not only herself, but to her society. It was pretty cool how the author had the main character discovering this long-forgotten truth and how her immediate friends and colleagues react. It’s akin to when humans started accepting that the Sun, and not Earth, was the center of the solar system. I’ve read Perreault’s SIMPOC books, but this is my favorite of his works so far. Definitely some food for thought there. What if a society developed so far and forgot their origins, only to discover them later?

I received a copy of this audiobook from the author at no cost in exchange for an honest review.

Narration: Christopher M. Allport did a good job narrating this book. His female voices were believable and his story-telling style was straight forward, letting me sink into the tale without being hung up on vocal theatrics.

Sci fi in pure form

If you want action, this book isn't for you. Fast paced, not for you. If you want an old school pure science sci fi take, then this is for you. The narrator did well, the story was well written but just not for me. I received this audiobook from the author narrator or publisher for free via audiobookblast in exchange for an unbiased review

I have to listen to the next book

I chose to listen to this book after receiving a free audio copy from the author. All opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased.

This is an interesting short story. It’s a quick listen and intrigued me enough that I want to listen to the next book to see what happens.

I thought that I wasn’t going to like the narrator until I realized that the characters were all robots. He used a monotone voice because of that, and it didn’t take me long to get used to it.

It’s a whole new world in the future after humans have depleted the resources that support life and only robots remain. It’s been a long time because the robots don’t remember that they were created by humans.

Helen, one of the robots, finds evidence that humans created them, and although robots don’t have emotions, they are curious. She wants to create whatever the DNA string is that was left behind so long ago. Will she be allowed to do just that? I think the answer is in the next book (full-length), and I’m going to start listening to it right away!

A SciFi Melody

With excellent short stories on a variety of unique SciFi perspectives, this book makes up an interesting and fun body of work.

Great

I loved listening to your story. I did not produce a review because I listened to it a lot. But I finally got it here. I intend to listen to it again though

Excellent

Thought provoking and very well done. It took a while to Intuit the conclusion and I am happy to say that I got it right, My thanks to the author and the narrator for a very enjoyable hour.

Science and the Four Laws

A scientist and her team discover strange, organic creatures and try to puzzle together their origin, only to lead the reader to discoveries off their own in this S.F. short story.
Ray Jay Perreault has put together a true, hard science story that would have been welcome in the golden age of SF pulp fiction. No space opera, no bug wars, no hokey religions, just a future world where survival of the fittest doesn't turn out to be quite what we'd envisioned.
A great way to spend an entertaining and thought provoking hour.

A Unique Sci-Fi short

Ray Jay Perreault is all about his own take on Science Fiction. And he is doing a great job of it. I have read and/or listened to many of his stories and so far have found all of them unique and interesting. A couple, like this one, have been completely outside of what you might expect. And so far that has been a good thing.

One major caveat. Mr. Perreault is a low budget author and in general so are his narrators. Low budget means not as much editing as a higher end book might get in the writing portion (some of the written stories I have read have had poor spelling and sentence structure,) and often the narration is passable at best. But editing aside, his stories are unique (as in he is not another copy-cat Sci-Fi author) and very interesting. In my opinion, well worth any difficulties in editing or narration.

Progeny, as heard here on Audible, had only one noticeable error and it was not a big deal at all. The story was well written and edited, and the narration was well done as well.

Looking forward to listening to Progeny’s Children to see if the full novel of a sequel is as good.