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Great performance, hard-boiled writing

Revisado: 03-03-25

The voice actor for this book knocked it out of the park like a Sea Dog! The writing was good, too, once you embrace its noir, hard-boiled style.

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Solid performance; story goes sideways after Vega

Revisado: 02-22-25

Another great job by the voice talent! The story was coherent up until they left Vega, then it jumps all over. A good survey of the Combine, but an unsatisfying narrative.

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Sooo much better than the abridged version!

Revisado: 02-12-25

Narration was great - they did their homework and nailed the many BT pronunciations. It allowed the story to really shine this time!

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Almost pure, uncritical fantasy

Revisado: 11-05-24

The idea that today’s robber barons who have fostered our growing inequality will not immediately and deliberately use AI to further that inequality would be laughable if it didn’t speak to the inherent blindness of business school faculty. Malignant corporate use of AI is a much more likely outcome than AGI or ASI, but it doesn’t even make an appearance as a possibility in this self-congratulatory hype book.

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Much Better Than “Forever Faithful”

Revisado: 06-19-24

BLP turned it around for this book and did a good job setting the stage for Hour of the Wolf. I was glad to hear logistics playing such a prominent role in Alaric’s success (though his planning team was a bit small compared to D-Day’s group). I was left wondering why no Jade Falcon has assassinated Malvina Hazen yet…

Tren provided another great performance as narrator!

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Clumsy Nonsense

Revisado: 06-13-24

The one good part was the mech battle at the very end. Everything else was contrived, illogical nonsense. An example: the CSJ remnant had two warships and didn’t use them to block the CGS attack just so the main character could die heroically in a mech battle, but after the battle, that same CSJ remnant is fully ready to execute their CGS prisoners? Just blast CGS in orbit before the battle and the main character lives on!

And the author spends chapter after chapter railing against the Star League for suppressing CSJ culture (including removing statues…this was written right around when Confederate statues were coming down in the US), but then lauds the “Fidelis”…for turning around and suppressing CSJ culture and clans tradition! He keeps going on and on about how the Fidelis are meant to preserve the best parts of CSJ culture, but never spends a single sentence to articulate what those best parts are. This book is a meandering mess.

A shame that they spent Tren Sparks’s time narrating such a poorly written book! Tren did a great job, as always.

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Hasn’t aged well, but still some good ideas

Revisado: 05-14-24

The professor’s enthusiasm for GWB’s military strategists while completely downplaying Obama’s was very telling given the release date of 2013. (Plugging anyone from the American Enterprise Institute as a good source of strategy? Oof.)

Filtering out that bias, there are some good ideas in these lectures. His willingness to delve into non-Western sources of strategic thought led to some surprising observations.

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Jarhead Fantasyland

Revisado: 03-05-24

The lack of an accurate understanding of anything beyond a USMC rifleman's wheelhouse was remarkable. The TRANSCOM, cyber, and space operations fantasies were particularly laughable and clearly contrived to put the focus on infantry action, which the author clearly wants to talk about. Which is fine, but just talk about that then and stop with all the contrivances.

This was a pale shadow of Team Yankee or other, better-researched military fiction.

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A good Mechwarrior-RPG book

Revisado: 05-02-23

Sometimes, it’s good to remind ourselves that mechs are supposed to be rare, remarkable war machines that very few among the trillions living in the BT universe will ever see in person. This book is built on that idea, and it tells a solid RPG-instead-of-tabletop story.

For those thinking this is YA for your kiddos, it’s as violent as the later Hunger Games books. Roughly PG-13.

As to the narrator, this was a much better performance than Blood Will Tell.

Overall, a good audiobook if you calibrate your expectations.

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There are worse BT books

Revisado: 04-16-23

Faint praise to be sure, but this isn’t that bad compared to other BT books. Some of the writing is decent, though it sure takes a long time for Danai to learn obvious things. Also, the ending was abrupt. The narration was adequate—3/4 of the way through the book, the story indicates that one of the main characters stammers a lot, which I think the narrator had been trying to depict all along. Not as good an audiobook as Embers of War.

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