The Last of the Unanswered Questions: Insufficient Data for a Meaningful Answer

Venus Alive, Book 1

By: Elliott Killian

Narrated by: Alondo Brewington

Length: 15 mins

Publisher's Summary

When Jack becomes the captain on a trip to the center of the universe to investigate how the cosmos all started, it seems straightforward enough. But tensions rise among the team's lead scientist and engineer. Then suddenly, they become uncertain of whether they'll ever come back from their mission. This uncertainty may undermine the operation. But if they fail to find the answers they seek, the universe may cease to exist, along with humanity and all other life forms.

©2017 William Elliott Vincent-Killian (P)2018 William Elliott Vincent-Killian

Too Short to Really Evaluate Properly

A lot of setup and no real payoff. From what little I got, the writing style was fluid and engaging and the narrator was talented.

Short and settle

Through this short story what I think can be a great point is focus on a single view point. Having too many view points can make the characters seem too clustered. I listened through my phone and didnt have the static problem but when put close it was there. Overall good story but maybe have a single focus point

Neither bad not good enough

Disclaimer: I received a promotional copy in exchange for a honest review.

The premise of the story--a spacial research trip to find the answer of the universe--sound interesting, but the execution is not done well enough. My main concern is that the story is too short for what it aims, leaving not enough place for building the setting or getting to know the cast of characters.

Performance was okay. However, the audio production was really bad. It sounded more like an amateur production with a minimal knowledge about sound editing.

Poor Audio and Amateur Writing

First the story. It's not very well written. It thrusts you in to the story without really telling you anything that is going on. While normally it's ok to do that, if you later have more world building that you're going to do, in a 15 minute book, that just doesn't work. The writing itself doesn't feel very polished at all. I feel very much like this was a "practice" book.

The narration isn't good. No actual audio editing went in to this, which leads to various problems like there being a stutter at one point, or being able to hear "mouth noises" before starting a sentence. Also, the narration doesn't change tone for each character, so you get no real feel of what character is speaking at any one point. This becomes all the more important when the writing has a person talk and follows it with a "he said" or "she said". Having that voice change would have been so much better.

Overall, I was hoping for a fun short story. I was left with just a short poorly written story that wasn't fun.

Poor audio quality and mediocre story

The audio had a bit of static and the speaker seem to stumble on his words occasionally. As for the story, I didn't find it entertaining and really only finished it because it was 15 minutes.

What?

The narration was not good. As a story, it makes no sense. May e it's supposed to be part of a complete novel, but as is not good.

Quick read.... Too choppy

I received a code for this one so it was definitely worth what I paid. It is a very short story and too choppy for me. Short sentences with "He said" or "She said" dominated it.

A Great Start

It's a very short story, but I think it has a lot of promise. It's definitely the launching point for something that could be very good, and I'm interested to see what comes out of it. Hard to judge based on just fifteen minutes, but I think there's much more to come, and it will be very interesting.

Not bad!

The narrator and audio quality were grating, which frustrated me considerably. However, that's par for the course with a new author. The story was a lot better, especially the ending. I'm interested in where this series leads. Certainly not a bad investment of 15 short minutes!

Intriguing scenario!

For the sake of transparency, I received this book as a free download via the r/Audible Reddit group, kindly provided by the author.

I'll get straight to the elephant in the room so that we can get on to the story: the audio and narration performance quality are both really quite poor. This is relative, I suppose, to other productions but I'm so used to the high production values of the "Alien" series, and the amazing versatility and engaging narration of "R C Bray", that it is really noticeable and quite off-putting.

The scenario is definitely intriguing and I think on paper, I'd be willing to give a book a go and read more. However, the character writing and narrator characterization were problematic for me and ultimately, I didn't enjoy the story much, short as it was. I enjoyed the science and this helped to build intrigue into what's going on, why the characters are there and what they're trying to achieve. The childish behavior and speech of the main character ("We're here to save the fracking universe!") was grating, however, and I couldn't relate or maintain interest in his, or his colleagues, motivations and actions.