Temporal Contingency

Big Sigma Series, Book 4

By: Joseph R. Lallo

Narrated by: John Forbes

Trevor "Lex" Alexander's life has been less than blessed. In the past year he's had to battle corrupt corporations, deranged techno-terrorists, and a robotic scourge. Now he's received the opportunity to finally return to the racing career that had been cut short by some poor decisions. One could excuse him for not wanting to be embroiled in another insane adventure when he is so close to returning to his life's calling. Sometimes the call of duty will not be denied.

Karter Dee, a certified lunatic responsible for many of Lex's recent woes, has discovered a threat on an unprecedented scale. He and Ma, his AI caretaker, know their plan to solve the problem will take a special mixture of competence, improvisation, and disregard for personal safety. Reluctance aside, Lex is the only man for the job. Even with the skilled pilot on the team, the scope of the problem has grown so massive that it may be unsolvable in its current state. Some would consider the situation hopeless, but any good engineer knows if you can't find a solution, you have to change the problem. To give human society a chance at a future, Lex, Karter, and Ma will have to venture into the past.

©2017 Books in Motion (P)2017 Books in Motion

Great story. Narration is meh

The story is great, although I would recommend reading the first three books in the series before this one for context.

The narrator leaves something to be desired, however. He occasionally gets confused as to who's talking and also mispronounces some words and misreads some syntax. Still, overall he does a decent job, especially with character voices.

Overall this is a really good story (and a long one). I'm glad I got the audio book instead of the book.

Amazing Great Story...Deserves a better narrator.

Any additional comments?

This whole seeries is one of the best SciFi stories I've listened to. The author is imaginative, does an excellent job of writing character dialogue and his character development is superb BUT the narrator is mediocre at best. This will sound like a repeat of my reviews of book two and three of this series. It is still well worth the low price point and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves adventure and quirky strange situations with a hero who bumbles his way through the most impossible challenges. You will have to put up with a narrator who mis-pronounces words, has only three or four different character voices, which should help keep the clarity of who is speaking, except that he frequently uses the incorrect voice so it is distracting and confusing. Fortunately, the author frequently tells you who is speaking but a good voice actor would make that unnecessary. I have to say that the reader's weird lisping affectations in the first couple books has been mostly corrected BUT he still misses his verbal emphases points. One of his most common mistakes is to lower his tone of voice and pause just right to indicated the end of a sentence when in fact he is in the middle of a sentence. It is a constant source of distraction throughout his narrative. He reads as if he's lazy and bored and just doesn't care about his performance. Really, this is a fantastic, excellent series. It deserves a better narrator.

The story was great but the narration was terrible.

Many words were badly mispronounced, confused with other words, or slurred. The quality of narration was bad enough that I will read Joseph R. Lallo's books but I will never again wince my way thorough another John Forbes narrated work.

Good story, narrator makes a few mistakes.

The story is fun and different! The narrator has odd pronunciation on some words and forgets who is speaking several times. Delivering text in the wrong voice. This aside, I would recommend this book.