The Ruins of Mars

The Ruins of Mars Trilogy, Book 1

By: Dylan James Quarles

Narrated by: Steven Cooper

Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Set against the turbulent backdrop of the near future, The Ruins of Mars opens on the discovery of an ancient city buried under the sands of the red planet. Images captured by twin sentient satellites show massive domes, imposing walls, and a grid work of buildings situated directly on the rim of Mars' Grand Canyon, the Valles Marineris.

With the resources of Earth draining away under the weight of human expansion, a plan is hatched to reclaim Mars from the cold grasp of death. A small band of explorers, astronauts, and scientists are sent to the red world in mankind's first interplanetary starship to begin construction on a human colony. Among them is a young archaeologist, named Harrison Raheem Assad, who is tasked with uncovering the secrets of the Martian ruins and their relation to the human race. Aided by the nearly boundless mind of a god-like artificial intelligence; the explorers battle space travel, harsh Martian weather, and the deepening mystery of the forgotten alien civilization.

Begin the epic journey in book one of the Ruins of Mars trilogy.

©2013 dylan quarles (P)2019 dylan quarles

Good story, but it needed a science editor

Great premise for a Sci-fi story. Great performance. But the writing could have used a good editor. The dialog was unnecessarily wordy for my taste. Science teams would have been much more to the point. The dialog here seems to have been stretched out to fill out 3 books when 2 could have been the sweet spot for this story. To me the greatest error was in the context of science and technology terms. A high school science nerd could have improved the accurate usage of the science and technology jargon in this book. It was cringeworthy at times. That said, I bought all 3 books because it was an interesting story. Had the book been edited by a person with a science background, it could have been a 5 star story too.
The performance was virtually flawless. The only nit-picking I could do was 2 or 3 mispronounced words. The characters were easy to distinguish and it was easy to forget it was one person doing the reading. For my next book, I'll search out something by this actor.

Fantastic science fiction story

The Ruins of Mars is a fantastic science fiction story hampered by mediocre narration.

The book/story: A very well written space exploration mission. The characters are memorable and distinct. I was very much invested in this mission.

The narration: Mr. Steven Cooper has a great voice, but the performance was lacking due to odd cadence now and then. Sometimes I found it hard to keep track of what was going on.

Overall: I'm going to stick it out as I'm invested in the story. This is a really cool story and I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes. The narration is not awful, and I'm hoping it smooths out as the series goes on.

Good plot idea lost in juvenile sexist stereotypes

Seriously this reads like a distillation of Bova, who was born in an older time and can be more readily forgiven the frequent sexism of his stories. Bova writes good long-arc politics even if his characters are often cardboard. I fear the author has here copied that style, and intensified it.

The scenes with the AI characters are genuinely interesting and there are just not enough Mars stories written, but the author here sabotages any chance I could recommend this to anyone without strong caveats about the fact that almost literally every scene with a woman and a man together goes out of its way to sexualize or demean the woman.

I am willing to sometimes look past small amounts of this but it was so consistent and over the top that I found those parts ever more excruciating. Moreover, they serve no useful plot purpose. Perhaps the author thinks this adds bonds between characters but it's too cheesy to have that effect. It just feels fake.

The plot also stops early, wanting me to buy a new book as if cynically offering minimum content to pass for a novel. plots are not tied up but are left seemingly intentionally dangling.

I bet a good editor could draw a line through or revise these offensive scenes, trimming out constant references to women's breasts and breast size and men's need to be nonstop evaluating women as sexual partners, and consolidating material from later books into something solid the author could be proud of and that I could recommend.

I want to read about the Martians and the AIs. That part is quite well done. But I am left in a quandary on whether I can stomach this other stuff to get the parts that were good. It's like visiting a clickbait web site so full of ads you have trouble finding the story.

Cleaning this up could have left me giving things four stars instead of two. But as it us, it's a big problem.

Great listen!

This was a fun well written book, I can't wait for the next volume to come out on Audible.

the narrator is the worst.

the guy has no range everyone sounds the same. makes it really hard to listen to

Great idea horrible execution

This book was slow and boring. The concept/plot is very interesting. The voice doing the reading was boring and had very odd timing in his delivery. Really tended to distract from the story. The ending was meant to be a cliff hanger. It was so unsatisfying that I will not listen to the next book. Over all fairly frustrating experience.

Too much!

Too much global warming, lgbtq. I was hoping this would be a good space odyssey. I wish I could get my credit back!