Amber in the Moment

By: Kirk Vonnegut

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Nominated for the Media Ecology Association's Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work. SUMMARY When unrelated thoughts burst into his mind, a Customer Service Representative finds that he has been selected as the conduit of a famous author’s final novel as well as become the target of a sociopath with extraordinary means. Nearing the end of his life, Vonnegut volunteered to participate in a secret Thought Transfer Experiment. Given his age, he believed it would help him write his final novel more quickly. The Experiment stored his thoughts in bubbles that were unable to be decoded until a much later time. Those in the future had to send the bubbles into the psyche of an unsuspecting individual who had lived within ten years of the Thought Transfer experiment. The protagonist must rise to the challenge of having his mind bombarded with Vonnegut’s final novel as well as evade the grasp of a maniacal, billionaire sociopath who has selected him for termination.

A good story poorly performed

This work is read by a computer generated voice that makes numerous errors, besides being flat and expressionless. It cannot or does not describe the illustrations that are a key part of the story like a human voice actor would. Buy a hard copy, skip the audiobook

Kirk is no Kilgore Trout

Is this book created by ChatGPT? It has the appearance of a novel but is a bunch of cliche's filtered through superficial 2020 cultural sensibilities. This project probablty take inspiration from the Kilgore Trout book "Venus on the half shell", which is a fun pastiche of Vonnegut sensibilities, but that book was written by a real human novelist - Philip Jose Farmer. This collection of the symbols of the alphabet assembled into patterns known as words, sentances, and paragraphs comes from some shelf in the Library of Babel. It is fittingly turned into sound waves by an AI voice whose malaproptic circuits can't decide if Bass is pronounced "base" or if it rhymes with gas, so the programming just alternates pronunciation. One of these pronunciations is the the intended joke, but the stochastical parrot strategy makes for a better, unintended joke, but it isn't enough of a payoff to warrent giving this any of your human minutes.