Star Divers

Dungeons of Bane

By: Stephen Landry

Narrated by: James Fouhey

Length: 11 hrs

Publisher's summary

Teenage Breq escapes the grim streets of a resource-low, near-future world to take a job as a "corpse diver" in a massive online sci-fi game, Bane. Breq finds himself in a dangerous, life-threatening adventure within the game as he searches for the reason for the death of his best friend.

With landscapes and settings that evoke the sci-fi classics, our hero must level up his character as fast as he can, so as to be able to take on and defeat a sinister, masked figure. Especially as the threat posed by the unknown character is not limited to events within the game.

©2019 Stephen Landry (P)2019 Tantor

good book need more

Teenage Breq escapes the grim streets of a resource low, near-future world to take a job as a 'corpse diver' in a massive online SciFi game, Bane. Breq finds himself in a dangerous, life-threatening adventure within the game as he searches for the reason for the death of his best friend.

With landscapes and settings that evoke the SciFi classics, our hero must level up his character as fast as he can, so as to be able to take on and defeat a sinister, masked figure. Especially as the threat posed by the unknown character is not limited to events within the game.

Not without issues, but a good story still shines.

I loved a lot about this book. It was clearly based off EVE Online, which is great to see in litrpg. It had a ton of great world building and super fun and interesting characters, and a story I could get behind and enjoy. Solid mechanics too, as far as I could tell. Anyone looking for sci fi litrpg should check this book out.

Now to the bad, and I kinda hate to even say it, but there was a lot. If it wouldn't punish the author and narrator, this would have been a solid three star rating for me. There was a lot of weird stuff that dragged me from immersion, and a couple of fundamental problems as well. First and foremost, this felt MASSIVELY rushed. It honestly felt like this story would have benefited from being a stock standard trilogy. There was SO much happening all the time that it simply became difficult to keep up or even to pay attention at times. It also suffered from what I can only chalk up to quirks that didn't get edited out, like the frigging constant "aka" nonsense. Some aka moments were even right in the middle of intense actions scenes, which bursts the immersion bubble instantly. The narrator didn't do a bad job per say, but I wouldn't call it good either. Overly dramatic at all times, with a flat out movie phone inflection on occasion that just came off as weird. Needs more range too. Some character voices were great, and then some were not so much. Just felt like they were maybe a fledgling narrator, within the first few years of doing this professionally. Not by any means bad, just a little wonky sometimes.

Overall, this audiobook felt partially amateurish, which is not actually a terrible thing in this case. I think both the author and narrator are talented people who deserve to be watched pretty closely as their careers unfold. This book, while flawed, is still genuinely GOOD and worth your time and money. I just gotta be honest when I review, and your product wasn't perfect.

liked it

a change from fantasy litrpg and a bit of a different premise. I hope the next book comes soon.

great space scifi book

The story as a whole was fantastic. No matter if it was "in the real" or inside of Bane, it was engaging. The characters personalities and emotions were well detailed and bright to life by the narrator. The plot was easy to follow, but still contained enough mystery to leave you guessing. I didn't want to stop listening and find myself eagerly waiting for the next book release.

Only thing that takes away from the experience. Was how long it took to read the stat sheet for each character or item level up. It's nice to know the stats to be more immersed. I just feel it was taking away from the story to hear them read so often in their entirety.

One of the best Sci-Fi LitRPG’s I have ever read!!

Star Divers is a LitRPG, and follows a 16yr old orphan who was living on the streets in a dystopian future, his name is Breq. He is picked up one day by a guy called Damien, after a bit of an encounter in the street, and Damien tries to help him out, and as a result, gets him a gig as a ‘Corpse Diver’ in an online game called Bane. To play the game, you are hooked up and fully immersed in a sensory pod, initially developed for the Military, but now available to everyone.
Corpse Divers have a special role in the game, and one that not many like to play (there are several classes of character to choose from, and from these, multiple sub-classes you can branch off into as specialties, like in most RPG games)
Breq is a Scout, but his job is a Corpse Diver, and together as a team, they find players that have been killed in Dungeons or on Ship Hulks. Players killed can leave an ‘Echo’, which is a unique artefact that has been dropped by that Player upon their death. This ‘Echo’, is surrounded by things called ‘Hollows’, which are ghostlike things, or spirits of the dead players, and can kill you if the touch you. They guard the artefacts or Echo’s.
Companies hire Corpse Divers to retrieve these Artefacts as they are usually rare or unique objects of immense power in the game, weapons, armour, a rare gem – all that convey higher powers than normal or very rare and unique versions of a weapon that are incredibly powerful for game use and thus can have massive value.
Because so many people play Bane now, ‘Value’, carries a different meaning, in that it obviously has a high game value, but that value also translates to money in the real world as well, and that is where Corpse Divers make a name for themselves. However, when you die in the game, you are reduced back to a level 1, and you lose everything.
That is of course, until Breq’s friend dies in the game, and his party is also killed, not just in the game, but their real world bodies die to. This is supposed to be impossible (unless you already have a medical condition such as a heart condition etc).
Star Divers is kind of a multi-faceted story, in that we are following Breq’s life as a Corpse Diver, and through his main story, we are told these other stories of the life of a Corpse Diver and the game of Bane, the main story of the death of Damien, and the subsequent investigation into his death by a group of characters, as well as the sub-stories of several other characters as seen through Breq’s eyes.
These are the other major characters in the story, and include the members of Breq’s Corpse Diving Team, there is Damien’s girlfriend, and Breq’s friend Cass, another scout, she is the soul of the team, and seems to keep Breq grounded a lot. There is Nel, Breq’s A.I. robot assistant, who helps him on missions, but also pilot’s ships for him. Nel is brilliant, (I’m not really sure of gender, but ‘it’ seems more of a she than anything?), She has this habit of telling Breq the odds of things, but whereas with C3-PO it was kind of annoying, with Nel, it is rather amusing, as she does it at humorous times, and in funny ways. Nel is just hilarious, with one liners and comments that for the gang, are just totally inappropriate, but for the reader, leave you in stitches.
One of my favourite characters in the story is Lady Gray, the leader of Breq’s team, in fact, she owns multiple teams, and they work out of one of her starships. She is a super powerful character who runs one of the organisation’s in game (and a family name outside the game – rich and powerful in both worlds), and there are a couple of times she shows how powerful she is, and it is pretty awesome. But it is the times where she is being the trusted advisor that you really see the depth of the character writing, and just how exceptional the character writing really is in this book.
Each and every character has had so much thought, so much time and effort put into them, Landry has put so much creativity and depth into everyone of these characters, making them so individual, the time it must have taken is astounding.
And that goes for everything in this book. The world building is just inspired. It is extraordinary, everything, and I mean everything has had so much thought put into it, as I said, the characters, the massive item list, the 77 levels, all with their own history, there is a full-on set of clan’s with histories and rivalries in the game, classes of ships, from little 1-2 seaters all the way up to orbital battle stations that hold in the hundred of thousands. There are numerous races. It is just fantastic, totally compelling and captivating .My only complaint, and, I know that this has been fixed to some extent as there are more books coming, is that this book, could possibly have been spread out into 2 maybe 3 books, there is so much in it, but it is just so good, that it works as it is, it is probably me just being greedy and wanting more as I loved it so much.
As hinted at earlier, the story is mainly about Breq and his team (I won’t tell you who as this will give away some of the story), going to find out who killed Damien, and how Damien was able to be killed for real in game. It has all of the expected LitRPG stuff, there is the levelling up, and stats etc, but unlike a lot of them at the moment, it does not overwhelm the story, and you don’t spend half the book having to read stat cards, or discussing how the character is going to spend points. It is just straight forward and to the point. Again, Landry has spent a lot of time giving his ‘in-game’ engine a lot of thought so that the dynamics of it work well, and run well. The RPG element is such that I would love to play the game of Bane if it existed.
Overall, this is one of the best Sci-Fi LitRPG’s I have ever read. I have the Audiobook of it as well, and have re-listened to it a couple of times since, as I just loved it. If you want a good read (or listen), then you can’t go past Star Divers, it is just Brilliant.
I have not listened to the Narrator James Fouhey before, and found him to be an exceptionally good Narrator, giving clear, concise Narration that was not only very easy to listen to, but was very ‘nice’ to listen to, as in he has a really nice and gentle voice that is really easy to listen to. He provides outstanding Character voices (both male and female), so that you know exactly who is speaking, either male or female, without having to be told, and most importantly, he puts so much emotion into the voices of his characters, so it is like they are really speaking the parts. It gives an extra layer of depth to the Narration that you don’t often get in an audio experience.
I suffer from severe insomnia, and like to listen to audiobooks when I can’t sleep, and I have taken to listening to this particular book, both because I loved the story, but also because the Narrator has such a great voice, he is so easy to listen to. This is one of those books, that it is so much better as an audio experience than reading it, as the Narrator has given such an outstanding effort. Brilliant Job

Great Story

In a very interesting setting. It gave me a Phantasy Star feel. It was a great change of pace for me since I was hitting fantasy really hard. Great characters. I really enjoy the quick lore parts of the book to give you a snapshot of what's going on with out killing the pace.

A super fun and super creative LitRPG story.

I loved Stephens approach to this massive online player world. A similar feel to Ready Player One, but I loved how there felt to be far more dynamic engagement with the game rather than outside influences that RPO touched on. The pacing was good and had good flow to the story. I really enjoyed the dialog and character development as well as their emotional growth all together. a well done, enjoyable story.

Good story but needs a lot more polish

The story is pretty interesting but the writing needs a better editor as many of the fights are very hard to follow and end too quickly with a forced add of stats that disrupt the story more than added the litRPG flavor. The audio perf left a lot to be desired making it very hard to follow changes in characters