On the Steel Breeze Audiobook By Alastair Reynolds cover art

On the Steel Breeze

Poseidon's Children, Book 2

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On the Steel Breeze

By: Alastair Reynolds
Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
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The award-winning author of Blue Remembered Earth continues his saga as the next generation of the Akinya family crosses interstellar space seeking humanity' s future...

Chiku Akinya, great granddaughter of the legendary space explorer Eunice and heir to the family empire, is just one among millions on a long one way journey towards a planet they hope to call their new home. For Chiku, the journey is a personal one, undertaken to ensure that the Akinya family achieves its destiny among the stars.

The passengers travel in huge self-contained artificial worlds - holoships - putting their faith in a physics they barely understand. Chiku' s ship is called Zanzibar - and over time, she will discover it contains an awesome secret - one which will lead her to question almost every certainty about her voyage, and its ultimate destiny.

©2013 Alastair Reynolds (P)2013 Hachette Audio Science Fiction Space Opera Adventure Fiction Genre Fiction Hard Science Fiction Literary Fiction

Continue the series
Poseidon's Wake Audiobook By Alastair Reynolds cover art
Poseidon's Wake By: Alastair Reynolds
Intriguing Plot • Complex Characters • Lovely Natural Voice • Fascinating Alien Mystery • Imaginative Worldbuilding

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The storyline vaguely continues, and like everything else by Reynolds has a 15-hour build up until you hit something interesting that makes you decide to finish the book.
The narrator...wow. The first book had a narrator that was so exceptionally difficult to understand that I created a "black list" of narrators just to prevent ever accidentally getting something by him again. I was especially looking forward to this and the 3rd book being by a different narrator....obviously a result of reader complaints I assumed.
Boy was I mistaken. This narrator was even more difficult to understand. The main character sounds like yodeling Yoda with a cold trying to mimic Scooby Doo. It drove me nuts. And the accents trying to give african characters some realism just alienated readers because we cant understand it. I dont know how many hundreds of words & sentences that were lost to me, and going back 30 seconds never helps because they are completely and entirely incomprehensible.

Such a slow storyline + bad narration = fail

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Humor, joy and wonder, this is high end sci fi. Alastair Reynolds read by Adjoa Andoh is just about perfect.

Impatient For The Third Book

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The book itself is pretty good, but it's honestly rather hard to tell with the incredibly annoying accents the narrator does

Another solid book from Alastair Reynolds

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The storyline is not disappointing but I did have some trouble with the narrator's heavy accent at times. attribute this to my superannuated ears.

A very complex narrative

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I think I'm pretty open minded, but sadly the audio performance on this story leaves a lot to be desired. It's a wonky combination of a story-bookish tone and missed nuances. The individual sentences are acted, instead of the scene or character as a whole.

I realized a few hours into this book that the narration was making me think less of Alistair Reynolds' storytelling ability. But when I imagined the scenes as acted by someone like John Lee, I realized the story could have felt so much more rich.

Instead of suspense, I felt apathy. Instead of urgency, I felt impatient. Instead of voice acting bringing personalities to life, I was repeatedly taken aback at how overly strong the accents were, including her use of unwritten, amazingly repetitive slurping inhales for the aquatics. The majority of dialog between characters intended for development instead feels flimsy because of the storybookishness tone. Everybody that isn't Russian or Southern-redneck uses the same African intonation, including the Japanese-named character (which got no special accent and is apparently African.)

I felt that the African style worked better in the first book. Despite my best efforts to enjoy the audiobook, I was constantly distracted by the audio medium. I frankly intend to repeat my experience of this story in print, in hopes that I can think more highly of the original text.

You unfortunately probably want the print version

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