Terminal Alliance

By: Jim C. Hines

Narrated by: Rebecca Mitchell

Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's Summary

The Krakau came to Earth to invite humanity into a growing alliance of sentient species. However, they happened to arrive after a mutated plague wiped out half the planet, turned the rest into shambling, near-unstoppable animals, and basically destroyed human civilization. You know - your standard apocalypse.

The Krakau's first impulse was to turn around and go home. Their second impulse was to try to fix us. Now, a century later, human beings might not be what they once were, but at least they're no longer trying to eat everyone. Mostly.

Marion "Mops" Adamopoulos is surprisingly bright (for a human). As a Lieutenant on the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish, she's in charge of the Shipboard Hygiene and Sanitation team. When a bioweapon attack wipes out the Krakau command crew and reverts the rest of the humans to their feral state, only Mops and her team are left with their minds intact.

Escaping the attacking aliens - not to mention her shambling crewmates - is only the beginning. Sure, Mops and her team of space janitors and plumbers can clean the ship as well as anyone, but flying the damn thing is another matter. As they struggle to keep the Pufferfish functioning and find a cure for their crew, they stumble onto a conspiracy that could threaten the entire alliance....

©2017 Jim C. Hines (P)2017 Tantor

A Splendid Start!

I was leery of this book. You see, I like funny scifi books, so this one sounded right up my alley. However, I dropped Hines’s Magic ex Libris series after the second book because it had a great concept but a mediocre execution. I am happy to say that this book had both a nice concept and good execution.

Earth has been turned into a planet of (effectively) zombies and was on its way to extinction when some friendly aliens came along and figured out how to make these “ferals” sentient again and introduce them to the stars. The effect of this is that humans are now subservient employees to their saviors and also the most feared soldiers in the galaxy thanks to how hard they are to kill. See? As I said, it’s a great concept. I love that for once humans aren’t the weakest, plucky race in space. Soooo what happens when all the humans except the janitors on a warship revert to their flesh-eating state and murder the aliens onboard? Well, you get a crew of janitors trying to fly a starship and not get killed by literally everything else.

It’s pretty great. Similar to the Bobiverse series, if you are familiar with it, this author took a relatively realistic approach. No one knows how to do the highly technical things and they often make things worse - much to hilarious results. The story flows well and nothing feels like it came out of nowhere. Additionally, while this is a series, this book is isolated on its own with a satisfying ending.

So yeah, I recommend this book to anyone who likes humorous or light-hearted scifi.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Terrible Performance!

This is a good book. It is entertaining and funny without being silly. But the stilted monotone of the reader makes it a genuine slog.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Custodial Engineers with Attitude

This is a fun book, entertaining, funny and action packed romp through space. The Earth has been totally transformed into the Zombie apocalypse, and few rescued humans, who are viewed by the galaxy as on the lower end of intelligent species, fight evil and challenge expectations. Definitely looking forward to the next book in the series. The narration was great.

Enjoyable, although Hines has done better before

The book itself is very good, the narration rather average and stilted, but still OK.

Narrator drags this book down!

While the story plot is not bad, the character development is diminished by the Audio Reader. She has a droning inflection and lack of energizing differentiated character emotives in her voice. Thus, my mind drifted off and I missed a lot of meat of book in my daze. I am going to have to pay more attention to book audio samples to get a prior feel of the Narrator before spending money on a purchase again.

Great book!

Can't wait until the next installment. The story is well written and I like how the characters are developed.