[Spoilers!] I didn’t like this book, nor the narration by James Patrick Cronin. The dialogue was at times frustrating, but more so was the bad science and nagging details. For an instance of the latter, they travel through a wormhole–fine–which requires stasis tanks, and tubes to take in food & water and pull out waste. So there’s 1) a system of tubes down their throat, 2) an IV in the arm and 3) a tube up their butt, but only 4) a cup for a males’ urine. Isn’t that a bit unsanitary? After months in stasis? Then, when removing said apparati, they unfailingly remove the throat tubes first, and the butt tubes last. Who are these people? Something up that way should at least rate second, no?
The author also brushes past the fact that we’ve made a lot of humans immortal, but doesn’t deal with any of the issues Asimov calls out, like overpopulation. Also, all the characters act as if their timelines are human scale, which, I suppose, is not surprising, given that they’ve just achieved that status; however, the effect is that although they’re immortal “in theory,” and have hopes for the future, we never see anyone who is affected by this, or lives accordingly.
Also, the wormhole is not traversable, and when the Confederation tries it they are immediately nearly destroyed, with no time dilation – which begs the question, where did the 2 YEARS of time dilation for Alex’s crew come from?
The reader, Cronin, is breathy on the ends of sentences, which becomes annoying fast, and he has the habit of making declarative statements into questions by a vocal upswing, when the sentence ends in a period. This is particularly bad when he’s reading for a military person speaking to a superior officer. It makes them sound weak and unprofessional.
Jasper T. Scott’s Excelsior
