Moonscape

A First Contact Science Fiction Odyssey

By: Ken Barrett

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

An uninformed choice…
Eli Thompson lived an idyllic life as a park ranger in Yellowstone National Park until an innocent fling with a divorced woman delivered a vengeful husband to his door.

Can change…
Convicted of manslaughter, Eli is sentenced to a life of hard labor on the Moon. In time, he settles in and meets Anna, and a budding romance begins.

Everything…
When alien creatures rise from beneath the lunar surface to annihilate a remote mining expedition, an exploratory mission is mounted to investigate. With nothing to lose, Eli and Anna volunteer.

What they find is beyond anything they could imagine.
An ancient mystery waits in a remote lunar crater. It’s a discovery that may herald a utopia or drive humanity to extinction.

Moonscape is a mind-bending first-contact hard science fiction leap that will keep the reader turning pages. Those that were enthralled with Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End or Carl Sagan’s Contact will love this story.

Virtual Voice a flop.

I am glad that I did not use a credit to buy to this as I would be asking for it back. I could not listen for more than a few chapters. The story might possibly be interesting but the Virtual Voice narration was totally boring. There was no real dynamic variation of tone or accent or even pacing to give the characters individuality. There were no gender variations either so that they all sounded like middle class, educated men sitting around a dinner table having a chat rather than convicts on the way to the moon to serve what was promised to be hard labor with no possibility of returning home.. There were mis-pronounced words and repetitions which probably were the fault of poor editing. I am a longtime fan of Audible so it is disappointing to think that money saving efforts might lead to inferior recordings. I have favorite narrators that I search out along with my favorite authors and I would be very disappointed should the use of Virtual Voice replace the real thing.

Unrealistic dialogue/uncanny valley narration

I thought I could finish, but I can't. All the dialog/banter felt weird and out of place. I regularly found myself thinking "no humans speak to one another like this"

The narration was done by AI and it's odd how I could simultaneously be surprised at how good it was and also how bad it was. Vocal uncanny valley I suppose? Sometimes it would nail a complex inflection and then turn around and fumble a simple exchange. Pauses also needed some work. I would definitely avoid this narration and will personally avoid any AI narrations for the next few years at least.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'd be surprised if AI didn't write the entire book. All the dialogue is so stilted and weird. Perhaps Mr. Barrett outsourced this one to ChatGPT. Or has never spent time with other humans?

There is an insane amount of repetition. Thinking about it over the weekend it occurred to me that all the conversations are reminiscent of dialogue wheels in video games. Select this odd question - receive info dump, select the next odd option - receive info dump.