Discovery

Taurian Empire

By: Nate Johnson

Narrated by: Daniel F Purcell

Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

First contact. Star traveling humans. Pre-industrial aliens. Ship's mechanic, Nick Barns, is temporarily transferred to the research vessel Discovery. His job, to keep the ship in orbit, and its three scientists alive. A job that is becoming harder due to repeated sabotage.

Xeno-sociologist Amanda Rogers' dreams have come true. Humans have finally found an intelligent species. They may be primitives, barely out of their own bronze age. The last thing these Eundai need is to be overwhelmed with human technology. History is filled with examples of primitive cultures being ruined after initial contact. It is her job to make sure that doesn't happen.

Priorities change when the four humans are forced down to the planet's surface. Staying alive long enough to get rescued is now the most important thing in their lives. A task that may not be possible.

©2017 Nate Johnson (P)2017 Nate Johnson

Entertaining story!

I typically don't like these kinds of books but I found myself looking for time to listen.

Discovery

Discovery by Nate Johnson. This is the way it should be life, all life is sovereign

First Contact Survivor Short Story

Another stand-alone story in the Taurian 'verse ...

The world building is pretty stock; so don't expect anything special here. The characters are pretty two dimensional as well; they have an almost 60's charicature feel to them. Start with the simple, honest man (a navy petty office) who is loyal to a fault and meets a girl way out of his league. Throw them into a situation where the boy can show howmuch of a unsung hero he is and the predictable girl meets boy drama can commence. In this case, ship wreck them on a planet with a primative alien civilization where they must survive until the Empire can come rescue them. Make sure you emphasize that the expected forbidden romance could never happen ... then do it any way. That is not really a bad thing (unless you are looking for something other than pure entertainment); sometimes I want a story where the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad and the boy gets the girl in the end.

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
#feeaudiobookcodes #audiobookboom

its ok

the reader was rather monotone and every thing seemed dry but the story is decent

Boilerplate story with bad writing

Listening to this book was like listening to a Valarian Howler monkey.

The most annoying and noticeable problem with this book is the extremely poor use of simile and metaphor. This was abused in lieu of good descriptive writing. Taking an earth animal and just sticking "valarian" in front of it to use as a simile as a replacement for writing actual context and emotion is not good writing. This method is used over and over in the book so much that is really sticks out. I have never listened to nor read a book that abused this so much.

The story also is extremely boilerplate. More advanced humans get stuck with less advanced and some bad guys some then the advanced humans come to rescue the team and oh by the way there is a love story thing. While actions happens there is no suspense to it and you can probably guess what will happen next.

Also they characters seems to comment on not making assumptions and parallels between human understand and alien understanding just because they appear to be lizard like. Then they do nothing but make assumptions. It really came through that the author has a poor understanding of evolution. Basically all the aliens acted like human. The bad guy we don't learn much about at all but are even stereotypical in looking 'rat like' and have a name like 'scrags'. Why would a species with interstellar travel need to travel to force slaves to harvest drugs? It really makes little believable sense and absolute no effort is put into even the pretense of building a believable world.

There there is the generic love story mixed in. Clearly written by a man writing how he thinks a woman thinks. All surrounding this silly idea of a man who is apparently a skill chameleon that can simply do anything. A hardworking but lowly engineer or a starship in the military for some vague "empire". Then he becomes some ultimate warrior that apparently already know the strength capabilities of aliens as he gets into a fight that makes little sense. Then at the end he becomes a lawyer and diplomat. The characters are really just superficial and the hero is just given whatever traits he needs to keep being the hero at the time. Struggle seems superficial.

And the narrator tries to do a good job. His voice was just to distracting. I encourage you to listen to a sample first to make sure you will be ok with him before purchase. (If you decide to purchase this bland story).

I will be avoiding this author.