The Sixth Artifact

De: David Collins

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Ben, Chloe, Mark, and the others are off on another adventure, one in which they stumble across another war out in the depths of space.

But, this time, there are no obvious good aliens and bad aliens, and things are not going their way.

One encounter somehow morphs into a Cozy Alien Murder Mystery.

Another involves a race composed of potentially poisonous toxic material that can shape shift.

Then, they encounter even more aliens, and nothing is what it seems. The clues are there, but one wrong step, and there will be more dead aliens and possibly dead humans.

excellent action and cool aliens

an excellent series, fun to listen to and imagine the possibilities. AI-narration isn't there yet, as run-on sentences, awkward pauses, and mispronunciation often catches the listener off-guard, requiring more focus and mental rearrangement than should be necessary.

Needs more depth

I am really beginning to dislike virtual voice narration. It is very hard to follow the story while driving which is where I normally listen to audiobooks. Also, these books tend to jump from story point to story point without really developing the characters.

Story line is progressing well.

The creativity of the story line is exceptional, good plot development without completely psychedelic story lines. The development continues to be creative and interesting after six books.

More “hard” science fiction

I don’t know if he got some help with relativistic non-simultaneity calculations, but I am pleased. On the other hand, the AI appropriately referred to the general size of an object as “bigger than a breadbox, but then when asked to be more specific, gave an area, square feet, rather than a cubic feet volume. I know. I am being persnickety… but still. 😜

Good enough

Some writers are better, but most are still good enough when looking for something to listen to.

Miss the inflections used by physical narrator.

All people, male female and species are the same. Phrases which might be stated in an excited moment are in normal tone.

Good story, but an absolute NO to Virtual Voice

I listened to all 6 books. Virtual Voice was completely distracting to this decent SyFy story. It is not ready. It mispronounced words. It pronounced words and names differently in the same paragraph, It has no clue where to 'take a breath' in a sentence. There was no emotion where it was really required. Narration should ADD to the story, not SUBTRACT from it! I will avoid books using Virtual Voice.