Shadow Captain

By: Alastair Reynolds

Narrated by: Clare Corbett

Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's Summary

Returning to the universe of Revenger, award-winning author Alastair Reynolds delivers another thrilling tale set among the stars.

Two sisters ran away from home to join the crew of a spaceship. They took on pirates, faced down monsters and survived massacres...and now they're in charge. 

Captaining a fearsome ship of their own, adventures are theirs for the taking - and there's hoards to loot and treasures to find in the darkest reaches of space. But the rules are also more relaxed out on the fringes, as they're about to discover....

©2019 Alastair Reynolds (P)2019 Orion Publishing Group

Critic Reviews

"A swashbuckling thriller - Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly - that nevertheless combines the author's trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterisation." (The Guardian)

"A blindingly clever imagining of our solar system in the far flung future." (The Sun)

"A rollicking adventure yarn with action, abduction, fights, properly scary hazards, very grisly torture and even ghosts of a sort." (Daily Telegraph)

Got interesting towards the end

The story is interesting but is far too drawn out.. That said it got interesting towards the end and I’ll probably end up listening to the next one.

Disappointing

After the excellent Revenger this sequel is a bit disappointing. Too much info dumping at times and the plot stalls for too long on the run down space habitat. Still the pacing picks up near the end and left me looking forward to book 3.

great but went too far with the spit sounds

really enjoying the book but the amount of spit sounds for Mr Glimery are pretty excessive. I don't need to hear that spitty sound every 10 words

Lackluster follow up

Stop at revenger its what i wish i had done, slow and laborious. It just feels like a short story with vast amounts of technical filler.

Not quite as good as the 1st

Although I did enjoy this book it did seem like it was a lot of filler,the first book in the series was much more entertaining,the narration is good and I look forward to the third and final instalment

Fun, but not literary genius

Fun and compelling, worth a listen if you like sci-fi and want something easy.

Good but not outstanding

There were things about this that I liked, particularly the portrayal of peripheral civilisations in decline. The wheel world scenes were reminiscent at times of the Canadian/German TV series Lexx, with insignificant people grubbing an existence within crumbling technologies from a previous age. And the scale of the plot was initially quite small scale in comparison to some of this author's earlier works, many of which I have enjoyed immensely. But it does come across as being little more than a prelude to the next book, which looks like reverting to the his habitual grandiose plotting, of which there are aspects signposted in the later stages of this book. Quite liked the narration, but not sure that I will rush to read the final part, although as space opera this is much better than most

Quite good

Quite good continuation altough sometimes the desisions characters make seem a bit stretched. Othet than that the world od baubles and sun-jammers is beutifull as always.

Half a story

I've been a devoted follower of Alastair Reynolds' work since the Revelation Space trilogy, but his recent novels have increasingly lacked depth and content in terms of plot. Shadow Captain is a particularly bad example of this. Very little actually happens in this book, and the most important element of the main narrative is handled in a very rushed fashion in the last two hours of the narration and left unresolved. This has clearly been done to set the story up for an obligatory third book, but this novel could easily have been half the size, or the whole story resolved in one book. On the plus side, Claire Corbett's narration is very good, with a versatile range of characters on display.

the correct question

survival is where it starts and by the end the secrets of the universe become the target. Top narration.