Walk the Plank

The Human Division, Episode 2

By: John Scalzi

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Wildcat colonies are illegal, unauthorized, and secret - so when an injured stranger shows up at the wildcat colony New Seattle, the colony leaders are understandably suspicious of who he is and what he represents. His story of how he’s come to their colony is shocking, surprising, and might have bigger consequences than anyone could have expected.

Walk the Plank is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories set in the Old Man's War universe.

Listen to the complete edition of The Human Division, the fifth full-length book by John Scalzi in the Old Man's War universe.

©2012 John Scalzi (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

What??

I thought this might be interesting and bought the 1st. one in series. The 2nd. made no sense to me and it is much to short. The story doesn't tie in with the 1st. book No story anywhere. This is not for me.

Prologue to the next episode

39 minutes ARE YOU SERIOUS?

If you exclude all names, there will be only 20 minutes left

this is just a prologue-side story to the next episode,
so don't waste time and buy episode 2 and 3 at once.

Bad style - at least for audio version

What would have made Walk the Plank better?

The writing style. The narrator having to say the characters name each and every line of dialog... ouch

How could the performance have been better?

I think the performance suffered with what he had to work with.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I couldn't finish listening to it. I suffered through the first series but I just didn't look forward to listening, so I stopped.

Any additional comments?

Just listen to the preview and ask yourself if you can tolerate that writing style for very long in audio format. The story seemed interesting but the dialog was choppy and the poor narrator had to constantly announce the person talking. Maybe this would be a better read vs. a listen because you could just gloss over the names. Thinking about it more, maybe as just text it would be better because there are those times where you read some dialog assuming it is one character, only to find out it was someone else talking at then end.

But in audio format like this, it just drove me crazy. Since the narrator does different voices, maybe they should have cut some of the name announcing out.

horrid

I dont know why the same narrator would change his style. In ep1 he was alright, in this ep i couldnt even tolerate it. Reading names before each sentence, reading doors opening, horrible. What a shame, I was really looking forward to the hole series after the first episode. Now? skipping all the rest.

too short

a waste of credits for very few minutes this should never been allowed to happen

I Was Disappointed

When I downloaded the first book, I got the impression that these were self contained episodes. The first one was over 2 hours in length, and the story seemed to stand on its own.

I foolishly didn't take notice of the length when I downloaded the second. I figured that if these were episodes in the vein of television series' that they would all be of similar length. I was wrong. Not only is this "episode" only 39 minutes long, it doesn't tie in with the first episode in any way at all! There's no context for what's going on here, and it just ends abruptly. It's abundantly clear that this episode DOESN'T stand on its own.

Now, I'm sure that future "episodes" will tie these two incidents together, but that's not how episodes work! These aren't episodes at all, it's all just one continuous book that has been broken down into sections. It's a cheap trick which I imagine is intended to build anticipation but it ends up just being annoying.

Sure, other books often require a continuation of the story, but in those cases they tend to end at some properly dramatic point. They don't just end in the middle of some minor challenge.

There's no way I can give this story high marks - it's incomplete. If I'm a teacher and you hand me an incomplete essay, you'll fail. Same here. The performance was pretty good though, I found no fault with William Dufris.

This may be a riveting story when it's complete, but right now it's not. Cutting up the story into sections like this really ruins the flow. It's complete nonsense.

poor rewriting style

best part is that it was short. Unfortunately that's the best part of the book. it's not a bad 39 minutes if you don't mind a book that reads like a play script, but it is definitely an opening chapter and not a complete story that is worthy of it's price.

Good but not his best

The Human Division is another chapter in the saga of Old Man's War, which is a hit and miss series. This one is somewhere in the middle. Good humor, middling characters, overall engaging writing, and convoluted plot.

I'm giving it a rock-bottom overall score due to the fact that this is not the version you should get. Pick up the final full book, not these expensive piece meal episodes.

really?

I usually love scalzi! buy the was two chapter excerpt... not what I thought it was.

Boring Hard-to-Follow Transcript

The narrator did a good job, considering what he had to work with. He had to read the name of every speaker!!! The book is 39 minutes of a boring story that sounds like this:

Brown: Hey, John. How did you like "Walk the Plank"?
Smith: It was pretty boring. I fell asleep listening to it.
Jackson: Oh, no. And you bought the whole series, didn't you?
Smith: Yeah, Steve, I did.
Andrews: Bummer. You bought it too, didn't you, Mary?
Perkins: Yep. I'm going crazy listening to the narrator read everybody's name!
Brown: Man, I bet that really sucks.
Smith: No kidding. Hope it gets better as the series progresses.