Synthetic Uprising

By: C. Mielczarski

Narrated by: S W Salzman

In the future, mankind has abandoned Earth to ruin. But they are not alone. Advances in artificial intelligence has allowed for the creation of synthetic humanoid life. Once meant to serve on the colony worlds as slaves, most were granted their freedom to live among the humans with the same rights and privileges. Bernie Logan, stage magician, is one such synthetic. When he loses focus once his lady love disappears his manager brings in detective Noah Carver to find her. But things are not what they seem. The stakes are quickly raised when a man Carver trails is found dead and Bernie is made the prime suspect. Soon the pair find themselves in a race against time, caught up in a much larger conspiracy which threatens not only all life on their colony, but those beyond.

©2014 Christopher Mielczarski (P)2016 S. W. Salzman

Synthetic Uprising

Any additional comments?

Enjoyable story that picks up steam as the story unfolds. In fact, I'm looking forward to the next book in the series. Good performance by the narrator. I received this audiobook for free through Audiobook Boom for my unbiased review.

Pretty good

The storyline was good just not spectacular. The narrator did an ok job but he was really choppy.

Narrator takes time to get used to

I received a free review copy of this audio book, at my request, and am voluntarily leaving this unbiased review.

This book is a short detective story. It has elements of sci fi and mystery and does both very well. The pacing is good, for what it is. It starts slow and progresses faster as the story unfolds and events are brought to a climax. The story rarely stops to catch its breath and instead sprints to the end.

This is fine for a short novel and a story of limited scope. Unfortunately this is a simple but complicated story, involving different players at different times and takes place in a foreign environment, in a culture unlike our own (a different planet in a time after earth).

So, with the entire writing taken up with the plot, what's lacking is any real description of society, the planet, the city, the rooms people are in, the characters, the back ground, etc. I didn't feel like I was a part of any of the story, I didn't feel as if I knew the setting, I couldn't even tell you what any of the characters looked like, save for one who was described as looking like an economics professor.

In actual fact, the plot was involved enough that this could have been turned into a fully realized 8-10 hour book, if the world and people were expanded on and realized. This would have been my preference.

The plot was enjoyable enough, if a little straight forward. Point a leads to b leads to c, etc. It was involved enough to be interesting, but not complicated enough to make for a good mystery. Having said that it wasn't convoluted or needlessly over twisty to make it tiring.

The characters are the same, not 1 dimensional but not fully realized. They are simple with obvious motivations and lack the depth of real people, however they don't feel like hollow shells going through motions unthinking.

It tool quite some time to settle into the narrator's, SW Salzman, style. His voice has a raspy quality and has a almost teacher reading material they don't know, kind of speech. It was very jarring at first, but by the end I didn't mind (still didn't like it great though). His voice range, however, was fairly good, distinct male and female voices, and good differentiation between speakers.

All in all, an alright book that could have been better if the fast pace was slowed down just a little, to make way for description and world building. The narrator takes time to get used to, but does an alright job. And the plot is straight forward but not so see through as to loose interest.

Having said that, I doubt I will continue in this series, as I like to have more world building and character development in my books.