The Descendants of Prontoth

Galactic Civilizations, Book 2

By: Mark Raines

Narrated by: Kyle Snyder

An 800 year, galaxy-spanning hunt nears its conclusion, setting up a confrontation thousands of years in the making.

For 800 years, Timion High Command has hunted the Descendants of Prontoth across the galaxy. Wars were fought, lives were lost, but the Descendants of Prontoth remained at large. Hamron Modestus knows Timion High Command has been doing it wrong. Their quest for revenge made them blind to the allies they would need to bring the Descendants of Prontoth to justice. In his new position of power, Modestus is on their trail, ready to succeed where High Command had failed.

Caught in the middle of this inevitable confrontation is retired General Dash Cricken and the entire crew of the Prometheus. Dash and his crew discover evidence of a secret alliance formed to bring down the Descendants of Prontoth. The crew of the Prometheus is caught in the crosshairs of Timion High Command, forced to defend themselves against the hunter on their trail and dissension within their own ranks. Any failure could jeopardize everything they have worked toward.

The Descendants of Prontoth is the action-packed sequel to Mark Raines' debut novel Felan's Rescue, following the crew of the Prometheus on another wild adventure.

©2023 Mark Raines (P)2023 Mark Raines

A Predictable Military Space Opera w/ Good Audio

This is the second of the Galactic Civilizations series following Felan's Rescue (which I have not read). The story revolves around two factions of an urmahlullu ("lion man") like alien race (aka Timions) where the dominate take no prisoners authoritarian government (aka High Command) is trying to exterminate the radical Descendants of Prontoth for having the temerity to surrender instead of dying to the last man during a civil war some 800 years ago. These same descendant were apparently introduced in the first book, but so far I am not seeing anything that creates any need to read the first story to understand what is going on here (with the possible exception of a galactic war where the Descendants played a pivotal role). Regardless, there are still fault lines between the seven (7) galactic civilizations that the Timion High Command attempts to leverage in their never ending quest for vengeance (which is actually just a weird justification for what boils don’t to an irrational hatred of deviants).

The story pretty much develops as expected, with a healthy amount of simple intrigue and space combat. Here is where the solid narration saves the day and makes it all more interesting than it otherwise would be leaving only few nits to pick. The obviously manufactured plot conflict is not really that compelling. World Building is primarily done via descriptive text info dumps. There are a few time jumps that were difficult to identify and caused some confusion for a time. There is absolutely no character development and few opportunities to connect with any of the character. Perhaps the most irritating for me is the constant/frequent use of the entire title of the Descendants of Prontoth every single time they are referred to. Would it kill you to consider an acronym or just using the term descendants instead?

I was given this free advance review/listener copy (ARC) audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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