The Wrong Stars

By: Tim Pratt

Narrated by: John Glouchevitch

A ragtag crew of humans and posthumans discover alien technology that could change the fate of humanity...or awaken an ancient evil and destroy all life in the galaxy.

The shady crew of the White Raven run freight and salvage at the fringes of our solar system. They discover the wreck of a centuries-old exploration vessel floating light years away from its intended destination and revive its sole occupant, who wakes with news of First Alien Contact.

When the crew break it to her that humanity has alien allies already, she reveals that these are very different extra-terrestrials...and the gifts they bestowed on her could kill all humanity, or take it out to the most distant stars.

©2017 Tim Pratt (P)2018 Tantor

decent story, barely disguised fetish weird love story

the story itself was decent and compelling, but the shoehorned love story was a barely disguised fetish it seemed. its very detracting from the story

Exciting and wildly interesting technology

I really enjoyed the world-building in this book. While some of the LGBTQ romantic relationships were a little pedestrian, overall the character development and world building is phenomenal. I loved all the human-cyborg stuff as well as the way aliens were depicted with their culture, science and technology. This reminded me ever so slightly of Becky Chambers book “a long journey to a small angry planet”, so if you enjoyed that book I’d say you would enjoy this. Very surprising and cool. Definitely not what I expected when I started it and I found the sci-fi elements very fresh, new and exciting.

Fun, but a little fumbling

This book reads a lot like a Becky Chambers work: it's a rag-tag group of space faring mercenaries whose predominant characteristic is that they are all just exquisitely *nice*. To that extent, it's lacking the usual dark undertones you'd expect in the genre, and the characters all feel very one-sided for all their varied backstories.

However, Pratt does manage to add more menace to the plot than Chambers, and clearly has a single coherent narrative--making a step up from what Lonely Planet presents as almost a collection of short stories. And while the lack of tonal depth makes the story feel flat, I do like the characters anyway and will likely pick up volume two.

Glouchevitch performs the work well, though his almost-whispering presentation tends to make this feel like a fall-asleep-reading kind of book.

I love these books!

I've already read this series and love these books. just the right mix of humor and action. the audio version was even better

The Wrong Stars

I really enjoyed this book. It reminded me of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet ... which is a book I actually wasn't a very big fan of. I thought this had a better story and better characters. I didn't mind the love story but felt that it started to take over too much of the story. This was recommended by The Shades of Orange YouTube channel. I wish that Audible had recommended this author to me. After this book I picked up Doors of Sleep by Tim Pratt and would also recommend it. If you like this try The Last Tribe by Brad Manuel.