Ancestral Night Audiobook By Elizabeth Bear cover art

Ancestral Night

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Ancestral Night

By: Elizabeth Bear
Narrated by: Nneka Okoye
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About this listen

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Halmey Dz and her partner, Connla Kurucz, are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence - with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big - just once - to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.

Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.

©2019 Elizabeth Bear (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
Adventure First Contact Science Fiction Space Opera Thought-Provoking Mind-Bending
Fascinating Concepts • Excellent Worldbuilding • Complex Characters • Thoughtful Themes • Unique Perspective
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It was really refreshing to get into a story that was as much about the self awareness of the main character as it was the rest of the SF spectacle. It delivered on both fronts, but it was the former that really made this stand out. It certainly didn’t hurt to have a narrator that was so good at nailing the tone of the internal monologue. Highly recommended!

Self aware SciFi

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Almost stopped listening and was glad. A different concept collectivism verse individualism. Then wrapped around space opera. Made me think. As always, some of the science was hard for me to follow. Did not dig the narrator.

A Sci Fi dialogue on individualism v community

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wonderful story, wonderful narration. highly recommend to anyone who lives sci-fi and characters with depth.

stupendous

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This is my first book by the author. I really enjoyed it. It’s fresh and smart. I’m late to discover Elizabeth Bear but I’ll be reading more of her work.

I really enjoyed it.

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I really enjoyed so much about Ancestral Night but I was particularly impressed with the character development, neologisms, and unique takes on future technological and societal developments.

Exceptionally intelligent Science Fiction

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Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night is a tale full of strange aliens, strange physics, strange biology, and bor-ing political diatribes. The main character works with a pilot and their ship’s AI to salvage space wrecks. They get word of a derelict and end up with a parasitic infection that allows for control of gravity as well as a mystery of what appears to be a former abattoir and there are pirates. The ship is chased by them, resulting in long, dry sessions discussing political theory; all of which appears to involve the re-crudescence of a long-suppressed memory.

Bear crafts a quite respectable structured plot with intriguing sci-fi elements, but with unremarkable and somewhat boring characters who drone on endlessly about political theory. The governmental structure is referenced, but never fleshed out, other than highlight hypocrisy.

The narration is decent, but unremarkable with a less than ideal alien renditions. Pacing is align with the pace of the plot.

When the past comes back to haunt you

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Interesting characters and world building. There is a lot of back story as a part of the plot. A big problem is solved but there is more to come. A interesting story line that moved a little slow but kept my interest.

A Little Slow Moving

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it's very good overall... it definitely has some slow spots... but what do you do when two people are trapped out in space and you need to explain what's going on... but what I really appreciate about Elizabeth Bear and her writing style is that you will learn something about spiritual evolution while reading it... because her characters tend to grow.

I also enjoy that there are characters in her books that are asexual or questioning or some other non-heteronormative experience going on... and that is true about this book too.

when the story began I was a little disconcerted with the reader's dry and somewhat flat style... but as you get to know the character you will begin to realize that in fact that fits with the mindset of the character. it's very likely that the reader read this book very thoroughly before deciding how to deliver the performance.

The one complaint I have about Elizabeth Bear's writing is that she often chooses names that are impossible to stick in my autistic mind... as if there's no point of reference there's no word that it sounds similar to, to me... so I often can't keep characters straight because of that... but all of that aside you should definitely read this book.

it's about a woman who grew up in what is essentially a cult... and was able to get away from it... and after some terrible things happened she discovered some secrets about what had really been going on in her cult which were even worse than what she had remembered and imagined. through the course of this knowledge she's able to discover which parts of herself she really believes in and to redefine the parts that she doesn't wish to keep, as part of her spiritual journey.

...And all of this is going on while she is sailing through space and partaking in space battles and trying to fight the bad guys and trying to figure out who the bad guys are.

All in all it was a very lovely book especially with the main character being female, interesting technology and physics, and some puzzles to challenge you along the way.

I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did!

Space saga with spiritual evolution

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Nneka has a nice voice and pleasing accent once you get use to it but she doesn’t have a large range to differentiate between characters. This may improve with experience.
I doubt I’ll get any more titles from this author. Book has many logic errors. People and things don’t behave like “real” situations would happen. She takes many liberties on just because to explain events. Most of the narrative runs smoothly and easy to follow but there are a few spots were you get lost as scenes are played out badly. All in all it reads as someone else’s story not an account of future events.

Kind of eh 🤷‍♂️

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Listening to this requires commitment, as it’s quite long and does NOT move swiftly, but the story is exquisitely told, with tangible characters and terrific “world” building. Imaginative tech, colorful tapestry of species and lore, woven into a crime drama and first hand account from the eventual heroine. It’s quite a gratifying story to conclude, though it does take an exceptionally long time to get there.

This is a long haul big picture SciFi Epic

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