abandon all hope

Good story . but has a hopeless ending.
will only read the next in the series if it comes up in a box set or somthing

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Almost deserving a 5 star

The performance was great! So no issues there.
The story took a while to grab me... By halfway I started to enjoy it and by the end I will say I thoroughly did enjoy the book as a whole.
The details encompassed in the technology present in the story were pretty solid, however, I found the behaviour of the scientists (fallible Humans though I realise they are) to not quite match up to their apparent intellect, or their capability as a person to have been included in the Forerunner mission.
It was that particular kind of point that had me not feeling quite so connected to the story in the beginning.
I know you'll get irrationality in all manner of people from all levels of education and culture... I am basing my opinion on my own experience in the scientific community, though.

That aside, after it started really becoming the Clayton show, the story grabbed me and I really enjoyed it.
I kept expecting him or Delta to pick up a dead aliens' weapon or strip the suit off or something...
Or that they wouldn't go back into cryo and would attempt to reverse engineer the suit and weapon of the dead alien aboard.

Those expectations were subverted, however, and I am not displeased by that.
The ending sets a strong tone for what's to come, and while some of what I perceive as flaws in the set up still niggle at my overall enjoyment of this book as an opening, I do look forward to the rest, and I just purchased the next one in the series.

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My mistake

I though this might be an interesting first contact story with a good yarn about exploration of an alien world.
Instead it was just basic space marines, space battle, galactic empires type of story. If you enjoy that type of thing then perhaps it's a good read, but I didn't find anything clever or original about it.
I prefer something that exercises a few more brain cells.

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4 people found this helpful

Characters not credible. Performance Droll

My first impression was the droll performance of Ben Jaeger-Thomas. He definitely reads too slowly for me and there is no exitement in his delivery.
The characters in the story are not credible. As supposedly highly trained military and science personel they break every rule in the book and consequently get themselves in to easily avoidable situations. I truly hope that mankinds first encounter with aliens has better representatives of the human race than these characters.

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