Sea of Red

By: James Bultema

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Award Finalist American Fiction Awards & Award Finalist Best Thrillers Awards

Sea of Red is an action-packed Military Thriller involving a war between China and the U.S. in their fight over Taiwan.

With Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles thundering toward the aircraft carrier USS Reagan, the captain has only minutes to decide how to save his crew of 5,000 before they all end up at the bottom of the South China Sea.

As the battle rages, under the sea, U.S. fast attack submarines silently maneuver against the PLA Navy while jet fighters battle for air superiority. On the ground, Marines fight for control of Chinese-held Woody Island. A Taiwanese tank squadron confronts a superior attacking force on Kinmen Island in a courageous attempt to halt Chinese forces.

In the White House, the president strategizes with his National Security Council on overcoming China's advantage in ballistic missiles and ships. His counterpart, the president of China, develops a daring plan to destroy America's fleet of aircraft carriers.

Sea of Red is a must-read, powerful new Techno-Thriller with warriors you won't soon forget.

The reader has a way of making the story irritating.

I just had to stop listening half way through. The reader was so bad that when the story spoke about 9/11. The reader stated it as “9 to 11,” like it was a shift at work versus a tragic date in American history.

Solid book!

Obviously, not a huge fan of the virtual voice, but story was very entertaining. Will be looking up this author’s other work.

Horrible AI narration

Remind me never to download a book that used AI narration. Every character, man, woman, different accent, nationality, sound exactly the same. That’s bad enough, but the pronunciation of words and the inflection points in sentences is horrid. Don’t even get me started on how it handled acronyms. Every time the book referred to the “conn” of a submarine, it called the damn thing a “Connecticut”. When the troops were “dug in”, the AI said the “Dugan Marines”. Took me a minute to get that one. I was thinking “what are Dugan Marines”, until that lightbulb in my head went off, for the 400th time, and I haven’t even finished the book yet. If this AI were a real human narrator I urge their termination, or at least find them and strangle them to death.

Great story

Great story definitely laid out a realistic way things could happen
AI narration wasn’t enjoyable

Not a fan of the AI narration

The story was good, but the AI generated narration was monotonous and failed to convey any semblance of human emotion. There were also numerous errors in pronunciation and the voice was garbled at times.

plot

too much description and ordinance naming. very tiring naming each munitions, it destroyed the plot

Do not care for “Virtual Voice”

While I liked the listen, I do not care for the monatomic virtual voice. There is no audial feeling added to the story line as a human voice actor does. I recommend the book but have issue with the synthetic voice is all.

Very good story, AI narration poor

I enjoyed this story very much. It was reminiscent of Red Storm Rising, which is high praise indeed. However, the AI narration, while easy to listen to, missed out on quite a bit of opportunities when some emotion would be useful. Also, the AI narrator failed to recognize that an acronym such as PLAAF (PLA Air Force) is not pronounced "PLAAF". There were quite a few errors of this type scattered throughout the book, especially as the author included many abbreviations when describing the military technologies of the US, Taiwan, and China. These made the performance rather irritating.

AI narration

Great book but the AI is so monotonous that it ruins the story. It needs a human to give the excitement it deserves.

Hate Virtual Voice

The virtual voice lacked any depth to the characters, I hope this is not the direction of audio books. The readers make the stories come alive