43 Seconds: A Hayden's World Hard Science Fiction Short Story

Hayden's World Origins, Book 1

By: S.D. Falchetti

Narrated by: Shamaan Casey

James Hayden has a dream, and the Riggs test vehicle is going to take him there. But when failure after failure leads to his last chance exploding spectacularly, he must partner with an AI and gamble everything for one last shot at the stars. "43 Seconds" is a hard science fiction short story that is part of the Hayden's World series.

©2016 Shawn Falchetti (P)2021 Shawn Falchetti

A Nice Quick Sci-Fi Short Story

One of the things I love about short fiction is that I’m able to read them almost anywhere at any time. Today on my lunch break I decided I needed a quick book. It’s cold and crappy out and I wanted to read something “out of this world”. An hour was exactly how long I had to kill and this book was a great use of that time.

43 Seconds was one of those stories that really benefitted from being a short story. Falchetti was able to put a lot of detail into a small package but didn’t make it feel overwhelming. There is probably a lot of things that he left on the table for future stories (since there are quite a few in this series). But, I didn’t feel like I was “missing” anything. Just know that as the story progresses that we’ll find more out about the main characters and the technology used.

43 Seconds as a short story on its own held up better than I thought it would, especially seeing that there were more books in the series – I expected this to be just an introduction and nothing more, but it had a good plot and honestly, quite a bit happened.

I believe this is the first Science Fiction book narrated by Casey that I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. His voice lent itself perfectly to this story and really brought it to life. I hope that he has the opportunity to narrate the rest of the series (especially the boxed set).

Overall, a great start to a series and a really good book for when you have an hour to kill.