Ethinium's Vault

Steam & Aether, Book 1

By: Jaxon Reed

Narrated by: Joshua Banks

He came from another world....

Sergeant Ripley Coulter leads the army's E-Squad, defending the metaverse from online attacks in NeuralNet, a completely immersive reality.

When enemy fighters take him out in a massive explosion, he wakes up in a strange new world powered by steam and primitive electronics. Fortunately, his game implant is still operable....

In this world, London is Ethinium. The UK is Greater Umbria. And the empires of Europe reign supreme atop ancient steam vaults filled with dark secrets.

Coulter joins the Royal Venture Society and aligns with the king’s forces fighting Darhaven, a mysterious source of corruption deep inside the vaults....

Don’t miss this thrilling steampunk gamelit adventure! Veteran science fiction and military fantasy author, two-time Kindle Scout winner Jaxon Reed presents an exciting all-new series set in a fantastic gaslamp universe! Featuring fistfights, machine guns, gang warfare, dungeon crawls, and sci-fi adventure, Steam & Aether garnered tens of thousands of reads on Royal Road and was a 2022 Writathon winner!

©2022 Jaxon Reed (P)2022 Jaxon Reed

Good story terrible naration.

I'm not sure if joshua banks is a real person or an AI, the reading is weird and stilted often stopping in the middle of a. Sentence and then starting back up as if. It was another sentence. The story is pretty fun though.

Great new series

Really enjoyed a new point of view of two universities colliding “sorta”
I wish I had found this book several books in this series as waiting for the next one Sucks!!

It’s a real page turner… if audiobooks have pages :-)

Good range of characters and character development. Surprising twists. And I gotta get me one of those enhanced wrenches :-D

Ok Story. Not good narration.

The story was ok. Fairly basic, but I enjoy basic. The narration is off. Either bad editing or AI that adds pauses in between words. I don't mind the different accents and voices the narrator goes with though.

Lots of Potential, Bad Narrator

The premise of this book is really interesting, and the setting and world building are amazing. The characters are interesting in theory, but in practice fall flat and two-dimensional. Part of this is probably the narrator; but part of it is the story itself. The author has created this interesting alternate world for the protagonist to explore, but then just sends him off into one endless dungeon crawl after another. there's very little down-time to actually get to know anyone.

And then there is the narration; which wasn't ... well it wasn't good. Joshua Banks has a lovely speaking voice with a bit of a drawl - i don't know if this was why he was chosen, since the main character is Texan; but if so, it was a poor decision. Yes, the main character is from Texas, but literally every other character (after the first 10 minutes) is Alternate-World-Equivalent-European. Most are British, but there's also Scottish, French, Hungarian, German, etc. and the reader seems to have extreme difficulty with those accents, for some, it seems like it causes him actual pain to produce the voices. ... That alone i could have probably adjusted to, however, he also has a very hard time with pacing and inflection. He... seems to read... every three ... or so words... with odd breaks AND ... emphasis. Speeding up to 1.5x helps a little bit; but not enough.

However, given all that, if book 2 was available i probably would have picked it up, so i'm giving this three stars.