But Ray Porter's voice needs to be applied to many more books. I generally only stop reading audiobooks if I can't listen to the reader any longer
I think the core ideas in Bobiverse keep me hooked as I just enjoy them but I see your point and don’t begrudge anyone who gave up on it.
This is a totally random question but have you ever read the Honor Harrington series? They aren’t related at all (other than “sci-fi”) but I’m always interested in other series people have read and enjoyed (or not enjoyed) and Honorverse is one of my favorites.
I will say that this series is pretty technical (in that I talks about the speeds of things and how fast things are moving) which I greatly enjoy but I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
i kind of hate audiobooks for this reason, my internal voice is just so much easier to listen to.
- All characters are two-dimensional. The further from the main protagonist, the more 2D.
- Dialogues go from wooden to cringe-worthy, with few exceptions.
- Protagonist swings from super over- cautious to careless and back.
- Alien with deus-ex-machina syndrome, always having the perfect tech, material or skill to fill in the lacks of the protagonist.
- Tired trope of amnesia to make the protagonist remember stuff progrssively for the reader.
- Extreme over-usage of flash-back, linked to previous point, but oh boy! Half the book is flashback. Waaay over-used story-telling tech.
The drive is named posthumously after him based on the design notes found on his computer by his widow.
I think this is a slightly different phenomenon though. The problem with Epstein is rapid acceleration resulting in an increased gravitational force relative to the speed of acceleration well beyond 1g and continuing to accelerate faster until fuel is exhausted.
The scenario in the article is about indefinite acceleration. Indefinite acceleration doesn’t have to be fast to eventually reach near light speed provided enough time.
For a long enough trip, anything over 1G results in your passengers and payload having to deal with excess stresses, up to and including ship damage or passenger death. In the Expanse they are quick to point out the increased chance of stroke due to prolonged and excessive acceleration.
1G is nice because you can move like you would on the surface.
It was an allegory for the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, in which Haldeman fought.
[spoilers]
Not quite. Humans develop (via cloning and other tech) to the point where they can finally communicate with the hive-mind aliens, and realise that the whole 1000-year war has essentially been a mistake from the outset.
> It was an allegory for the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam
Yes. The obvious allegory is that to the very few baseline humans who survive the entire war due to time dilation effects the whole thing was a complete waste of time.
A key subplot in the book is that humanity adopts homosexuality such that in the latter stages of the war, the baseline heterosexual veterans are perceived as weird sexual deviants. This seems to me allegory for the difficulty Vietnam vets had in readjusting to civilian life.
Perhaps it's also to give some perspective of what it can be like for gay people sometimes by providing an opposite world.
The main character is spacially and temporally separated from his love interest/comrade during the war. At the end, he receives a letter saying she's been in cryo sleep aboard a ship experiencing time dilation to wait for his return.
Outside of RS, I also liked House of Sun a lot.
I guess I'm weird.