On the Rocks

Arturo Sandus, Book 1

By: Peter Rhodan

Narrated by: Dave Core

Captain Arturo Sanders was having a bad day. First the routine destruction of some ancient automatic defense batteries became a disaster, when his ship’s screens failed, and he had no choice to abandon ship.

Then he had to rescue two left behind crew people, which meant he missed the main shuttle evacuation leaving him and his two companions in a shuttle on their own at the rear.

Then the shuttle was hit by enemy fire just as they traversed the jump point, of course! This sent the shuttle through something to somewhere, but not the safe system the rest of the crew had jumped to!

The damage to the shuttle meant they would need a dockyard or failing that they would have to land on a planet to effect repairs, which seemed likely, as the system had no electronic signature, so space docks looked unlikely.

The third planet was in fact inhabited, but by primitives armed with swords and spears, probably an old Imperial colony that had been cut off and regressed tech-wise. They should be able to land and repair their shuttle somewhere out of the way, except, of course, the engines decided to fail halfway down!

This led to a close encounter with the side of a mountain, followed by a crash-landing into a lake.

And then his day got really bad!

©2020 Peter Rhodan (P)2021 Peter Rhodan

Moar please

after seeing the paper copy, I don't think we should blame the Narrator so harshly. Often people with new ideas might be amazing creators but lack lets say... writing acumen. If you can look past these faults, do give the story a go. If only so Audible will produce the next book for the rest of us hahaha. I love this sub genre and have at least 7 similar novels under the belt but love this story for its groundbreaking. I do recommend trying it. Experienced listeners will have no problem.

great story, rushed narration?

I really enjoyed the book and read the whole series so went back later to see if there were any more in the series; saw there was a audio book now which I was grateful to find but unfortunately the narration is awful pacing.

Great start.

Voice actor needs more practice and better sound editing.
Hopefully it doesn't devolve into Christian bashing, being critical is fine but blaming the fall of Rome on Christianity just rolling my eyes. The emperor simply left pagans north of Balkans to themselves and true to Constantine's saying "make haste slowly" main reason city of Rome was left to fend for itself power was mover to New Rome(Constantinople) capital was often mover closer to the action.... Rant over... Book is rather good loved the twist. Has an actual ending and no real cliffhanger, while leaving and opening for next book.

Will be getting next audio book... Or Kindle book if they take too long on follow up.

Enjoyable story, narration needs work.

I enjoyed the story and look forward to the next book. that said, the narration was a bit challenging, with no pause between thoughts and little to no inflection. I slowed the playback speed to 85%, and that made for a much better listen.

Don’t do it...

The narrator was so bad I couldn’t even listen past the first 15 minutes. No inflection... like nails on the chalk board.
I have no idea if the book was good or bad...I wish I would have listened to the excerpt, another wasted credit.
No rating, one star was too generous....

This guy is in a hurry.

I don't know if this is a good story or not. The narration is so fast, and is read as if commas and punctuation do not excist. I feel constantly out of breath. It is actually uncomfortable to listen to.