Scriiiiitch! Scraaaatch!

I listened to all four books. That may eventually provide me with some personal psychological insight, or indicate some quality to the books. But I did ask myself wondering every few minutes why I was still listening.

This genre is escapism for me. I don’t expect too much. Maybe some imaginative science fiction with hopefully creative tactics, battles and wars.

First and foremost, this story fails in the science fiction department. The central premise is that this race of multidimensional aliens needs to, and can, travel faster than light speed to harvest water from other planets, carelessly destroying civilisations on their merry way.

This is silly in itself in that hydrogen and oxygen aren’t exactly the rarest elements in the universe and these guys do not lack the energy to put them together.

Then, rather than go for the oceans first, as any sensible water harvester would do, they decide that their first priority is to suck the living moisture out of every living terrestrial creature because every drop of water is so precious. Poor efficiency but lots of opportunities for vamparish critters that suck water rather than blood. (I guess there’s water in blood, but you get the idea.) Especially concerning though is how they get all that water into space and where do they store it. Maybe they dehydrate it?

I’ll ignore a lot of other inconsistencies with real or imagined physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, and computer science, including glaringly, cryptography.

Then there’s the warfare…

We have the standard team of flawed yet heroic and exceptional American heroes who fight the aliens with resilience and standard issue infantry weapons. We also have a core of brilliant scientists with some token gender balancing. The rest of the world is represented by some bad AI accents, and the Chinese and Japanese teams, both of which get wiped out. Sorry folks.

Luckily, despite the aliens’ manifest abilities, their forces suffer from a single point of vulnerability which the humans get to exploit over and over again without the aliens exhibiting any learning curve. This leads to a far too long series of encounters with the humans mostly just scraping through except for the requisite tragic deaths. This gets boring by Book 4.

The performance is terrifying. The narrator yells way too much and these professional military types and cool professional scientists come across as screaming babies. (Note to the narrator: I’m pretty sure that the male name is “ee-man-well.” “Ee-man-u-elle” is the female equivalent.)

So, I’d encourage you to give this one a miss. There are much better mindless pursuits to enjoy!

(Why am I writing this?!)

8 people found this helpful

Disappointing

I don't know how I stuck with this series all the way through, kept wanting to give up but hoping it would get better ........it doesn't. The story itself had promise but in the end I was getting angry at the characters because they were so pathetic and I found myself hoping they would be killed off and replaced with someone more interesting. Oh and then there is the naration, what is with all the yelling! Stop it! It hurt my ears. Maybe R C Bray could have saved this series but even his genius has limits. Go listen to Expeditionary Force, it's a million times better than this rubbish.

6 people found this helpful

frustrating: poor and frustrating science

I pushed through this just hoping that it would get better. the last book started seem better but maybe I was just numb to the stupidity and Bold and the Beautiful script.

6 people found this helpful

I tried

I really like the story and plotline in this series and would love to see the outcome but the delivery of the story is pretty sub par, the dialogue is borderline cringe, the narrator doesnt do it any favours, and I felt no emotions towards literally any of the characters to the point where im stopping an hour into book 2.

6 people found this helpful

Bad Narrator

The story is a little far fetched but that's the least of this series problems, the narration is a absolute mess, when he's talking normally it's fine but his depiction of the Ai's and his accents are just plain awful and really take away from the story.

3 people found this helpful

Glad it was free

Stupid science, predictable plot, no relatable characters, repeatative combat (and those skreech scrape sound effect in evcery second paragraph had me tearing my hair out) and horrible voice accents (standard narration was OK but all the "characterisations" were abysmal). I am so glad I picked it up as a "free to members" download and didn't waste a perfectly good credit on getting it. If I wasn't so OCD about completing things that I start I would NEVER have gotten through it all - I wanted to give it up multiple times.

1 person found this helpful

2 books to many.

Started promising but lost me, skipped to the end during book 4. Characters seemed to get dumber at times to promote the story lines.
Narrator was quite annoying at times with characters yelling/screeching and emphasising words at the wrong times.
Oh and Scraaaatch Scraaaap gets really old!

1 person found this helpful

Started out with so much potential

and then everything became way too far fetched, too many holes in the storyline. performance was good, however, too much shouting for my liking.

1 person found this helpful

great fast read

fast paced , keeps you wondering when something good will happen but it's not till the last chapters of book 4 ..

Survival of the fittest

Interesting story line, set in the not too distant future. Earth has been pummelled by solar flares and temperatures have risen. A Biospheres project containing scientists going into lock down for a 6 month training mission, to eventually end up on mars has just commenced. 3 days into the mission aliens invade, they are after earths water supply and drain it dry… The majority of earths population is wiped out in a matter of months. With a handful of military personnel, doctors, scientists and some lucky kids you are taken on an agonising journey of survival of the human race.
Some of the AI voice work was hard to listen to at the start but was worth getting past that! Cool story line, full of twists and turns to keep you interested.