Ironclads

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Scions have no limits. Scions do not die. And Scions do not disappear.

Sergeant Ted Regan has a problem. A son of one of the great corporate families, a Scion, has gone missing at the front. He should have been protected by his Ironclad - the lethal battle suits that make the Scions masters of war - but something has gone catastrophically wrong.

Now Regan and his men, ill-equipped and demoralised, must go behind enemy lines, find the missing Scion and uncover how his suit failed. Is there a new Ironclad killer out there? And how are common soldiers, lacking the protection afforded the rich, supposed to survive the battlefield of tomorrow?

A stand-alone audiobook by the Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

©2017 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd

Fun military science fiction

An interesting mix of the knights of old mixed with the corporations of new. A lot of social commentary but a hella fun ride.

Terrible narrator

The story is fine, with some decent concepts in it, but it really doesn't have much happen. The narrator, however, is terrible.
His enunciation are bizarre (like a bad Captain Kirk impersonation) and I thought, for a long time, that maybe it was read by AI.
Apparently not. A real human read it. His diction and enunciation are terrible. Is that how he things American soldiers speak? He also mispronounced A LOT of words. A LOT.
This really needed a director who speaks the language fluently supervising the narration.

HORRIBLE NARRATOR

Great story, horrible narration. It's as if they used a 1990s digital narrator from Microsoft to read this. SAMPLE FIRST :)

Solid Story, Terrible Narration

Not Tchaikovsky’s best story, but still very worth reading - keyword READING.

The narration is distractingly awful.

Pretty good, narrator’s a little dodgy

I like the story of this pretty well. It moves fast, the concept is interesting, and it recognizes how terrifying Finns are. The narrator does okay, but he’s British and his American accent is pretty ropey. He does okay with the main character’s voice, but has trouble differentiating the other characters. Because of how the story’s structured this doesn’t matter as much as it might in another book.

Phenomenal

I would like more from the story. Adrian Tchaikovsky scratches a sci-fi itch that no one else does. More please.

Narrator swings and misses

This was a great, punchy sci-fi story that was difficult to listen to because of the awkward drawl and pacing Peter Noble chose for the POV character. It sounded like a southern accent from someone who never heard a southerner speak before. If the story wasn’t so engaging, his narrative choice would have turned this into a DNF from me.

Not worth listening to.

Dumb story, with the titular Ironclads (not actually called Ironclads in the text) are a trite metaphor for a boring class struggle.

Tchaikovsky's writing is hit or miss. Shards of Earth and Cage of Souls were pretty good, This was not good at all. I wanted to give the overall rating and story rating one out of 5 stars, but then there would be no way to describe how utterly terrible the narration of this story actually is. I was trying to think of a worse narration from audible, but I could not think of any thing worse. I could however think of something just as terrible. Linked to the same author. The woman who narrated the Children of Time series. Just a nasty thing to do to any story, even if the story is dumb.

rushed and meh

the story feels like its trying to say something but the narrator continually takes a middle ground so it feels like very bland social commentary.

Couldn't get past horrible accents

The story is a somewhat formulaic post-corporate takeover dystopia with tough sergeant and rough commando followers on a mission with added robots. All very fine, but the 1st person narrating sergeant has a weird exaggerated regional American accent from no region anywhere. One hour of gritting my teeth and I just can't take it anymore. I think I could read the book. If the narrator was just average or a little below average I'd be OK. This guy is special. Off to find something else to listen to. Cheers.