Sea of Red

By: James Bultema

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Major Awards:
Award Winner - Independent Press Awards
Award Winner - Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award
Award Winner - Military Writers Society of America
Award Finalist - American Fiction Awards
Award Finalist - BestThrillers.com
Distinguished Favorite - New York City Big Book Award

From multi-award-winning author James Bultema comes Sea of Red, an action-packed Military Thriller involving a war between China and the U.S. in their fight over Taiwan.

With Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles thundering toward the aircraft carrier USS Reagan, the captain has only minutes to decide how to save his crew of 5,000 before they end up at the bottom of the South China Sea.

As the battle rages, under the sea, U.S. fast attack submarines silently maneuver against the PLA Navy while jet fighters battle for air superiority. On the ground, Marines fight for control of Chinese-held Woody Island. A Taiwanese tank squadron confronts a superior attacking force on Kinmen Island in a courageous attempt to halt Chinese forces.

In the White House, the president strategizes with his National Security Council on overcoming China's advantage in ballistic missiles and ships. His counterpart, the president of China, develops a daring plan to destroy America's fleet of aircraft carriers.

Sea of Red is a must-read, powerful Techno-Thriller with warriors you won't soon forget.
Book 1 of 4 in the Sea of Red Series.

Great story, Ai narration is painful

Great story, Ai narration is absolutely painful. But I also think the story is worth the pain.

The reader has a way of making the story irritating.

I just had to stop listening half way through. The reader was so bad that when the story spoke about 9/11. The reader stated it as “9 to 11,” like it was a shift at work versus a tragic date in American history.

Solid book!

Obviously, not a huge fan of the virtual voice, but story was very entertaining. Will be looking up this author’s other work.

Horrible AI narration

Remind me never to download a book that used AI narration. Every character, man, woman, different accent, nationality, sound exactly the same. That’s bad enough, but the pronunciation of words and the inflection points in sentences is horrid. Don’t even get me started on how it handled acronyms. Every time the book referred to the “conn” of a submarine, it called the damn thing a “Connecticut”. When the troops were “dug in”, the AI said the “Dugan Marines”. Took me a minute to get that one. I was thinking “what are Dugan Marines”, until that lightbulb in my head went off, for the 400th time, and I haven’t even finished the book yet. If this AI were a real human narrator I urge their termination, or at least find them and strangle them to death.

Not a fan of the AI narration

The story was good, but the AI generated narration was monotonous and failed to convey any semblance of human emotion. There were also numerous errors in pronunciation and the voice was garbled at times.

Great story

Great story definitely laid out a realistic way things could happen
AI narration wasn’t enjoyable

Very good story, AI narration poor

I enjoyed this story very much. It was reminiscent of Red Storm Rising, which is high praise indeed. However, the AI narration, while easy to listen to, missed out on quite a bit of opportunities when some emotion would be useful. Also, the AI narrator failed to recognize that an acronym such as PLAAF (PLA Air Force) is not pronounced "PLAAF". There were quite a few errors of this type scattered throughout the book, especially as the author included many abbreviations when describing the military technologies of the US, Taiwan, and China. These made the performance rather irritating.

Racist

There were no females in high positions. There were no gays or non-binaries anywhere in the story. So this story is cis-normative phallocentric trans-cidal hate speech. The least the author could arrange is for a gorgeous female Chinese pilot and an American boy to crash on the same remote island and continue war by other means (marriage).

Also, war stories need directed energy weapons.

The story ends e with China importing a large amount of money. Would President Trump impose a tariff?

AI voice is not up to the yet

The story seems fair but is not overly involved and follows the familiar hypothetical war trope that could be applied to a Cold War Soviet - NATO war. What is maddening is the poor quality AI generated voice. In a modern military novel, you are going to have lots of acronyms. The inability of the AI to properly annunciate them and it gets progressively worse as the book goes on. What is particularly disappointing is the author or producer could not take the time or effort to listen and correct things. Good thing it was a free listen.

AI narration

Great book but the AI is so monotonous that it ruins the story. It needs a human to give the excitement it deserves.