The Science Officer

By: Blaze Ward

Narrated by: Matt Weight

Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

When pirates commandeer Javier's starship, they give him a choice: corpse, slave, or volunteer.

Javier chooses to survive as well as keep his honor and his sanity intact.

However, when things get rough, will he save the pirates from someone even worse?

©2014 Blaze Ward (P)2015 Blaze Ward

Dull

I never did finish this book. It never did grab my attention as nearly every sci finally book does.

Good narrator

But I rapidly got tired of the horndog personality of the lead character. Each female was assessed, not for competence but figure and friendliness. I did enjoy the narrator's voice, though.

Good Short Story

I rarely purchase audiobooks under 7 hours, mainly because I like to have the time to get into a story, but I'm glad I decided to get this one.

The story focuses around an officer who mans a deep space survey vessel. He has outfitted the ship with botany labs for growing his own food, has a chicken coop, and has programed an advanced ship AI who is his only real company. When his ship is attacked by pirates, he must copy the AI and hide her so that the pirates can't use the small military ship for themselves. The pirates end up cutting the ship into pieces to make the most profit from it, taking key components like the botany labs, engines, and sensors. Rather than be sold into slavery, the main character agrees to become an unpaid member of the pirate ship's crew for several years (and work off the amount they would make by selling him). His expertise in science and engineering makes him a valuable asset to the pirates and he becomes the ship's official Science Officer.
Throughout the rest of the story, the character is conflicted about his decision to work for the pirates, and gradually makes plans for his future escape.
When on an away mission he must make a decision of whether to save the lives of some of the pirates, thereby upholding his morals and earning their trust, or letting them die and get what's probably coming to them while increasing his chance of escape.

I thought this was a well thought out short story. I was pleased to find there is actually a sequel to the story, which I now intend to listen to as well.

Great lead character

The main character is complex and well written, and doesn't hold with a lot of the sci fi cliches. Very good story.

Well written but incomplete

What made the experience of listening to The Science Officer the most enjoyable?

I really started to like the Character but it felt like this was just part of the book.

Would you recommend The Science Officer to your friends? Why or why not?

As a short only.

False falsetto

The narrator was good except for his attempt at a female voice, his baritone is amazing but he needs so practice in falsetto.

Interesting ideas but falls short on execution

This story is chock full of good ideas. However the writing and dialog let the story down. Narrator has a one note voice that rolls along far too slowly.

Narrator issues

I couldn't do it. I genuinely tried to get into this story, and for all I can tell it's a good book with decent writing--I think. The narrator, while he does try to do voices (props for that), is stuck in a captain Kirk -esque speaking pattern, where he makes every word its own sentence. The resulting monotone and repetitive, mind-blowingly dull cadence was too much for me to deal with.