Sunday, February 24, 2019

Off the Bookshelf: ZERO G, by Dan Wells

My second audiobook. This one was an Audible Original, meaning if you're in the know and a member ... Free! Audible Original = only available on Audible.

I knew the name Dan Wells from the Writing Excuses podcast, so that made me curious. I wanted to see how one of my "writing teachers" wrote.

FUN book. Or rather, a dramatization of a YA SF adventure.

Besides having a narrator, characters were given voices by actors. My brother used to collect old-time radio dramas on records (yeah, that long ago) so I'm familiar with, and like, audio dramatizations. I Love a Mystery, The Green Hornet, The Shadow, and others.

Zero is the nickname of our hero, the youngest of 3 boys in a family boarding a sleeper ship, heading for a new world 100-plus years of travel away. They have to spend the voyage in stasis because the speed at which their ship travels will kill the thousands of passengers. Zero is that kid who doesn't mean to get in trouble, but he doesn't always follow the rules, either. He wants to explore and know things. He wakes up before everyone else and realizes he's the only one awake on a ship about to shift into killing speed, and his stasis pod has malfunctioned so he can't get back into it, and his only help comes from a navigational artificial intelligence named Sancho. And oh yeah, did I mention a bunch of space pirates are at the airlock, and they've overridden Sancho's programming and are about to turn him off, and the clock is ticking down?

What does our hero do? Will time run out? Will the pirates win? Will his brothers wake up and see all the things Zero painted on their stasis pods, making fun of them?

Major fun. The 4 hours of the story went so fast. I didn't want to turn off my iPhone!
Can't wait until my to-be-read list has gone down a few feet, so I can explore more books by this author.

No comments: