Blood and Steel Audiobook By Josh Hayes, Devon C. Ford cover art

Blood and Steel

Tranquility, Book 1

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Blood and Steel

By: Josh Hayes, Devon C. Ford
Narrated by: Scott Aiello
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They came to start a new life. Now they have to fight for it.

Joel Lander wants nothing more than a fresh start, far from Earth and wars that have left humanity’s birthplace in shambles. Leaving on the second mission to the distant world of Tranquility, Lander and his family plan to build a brand-new life for themselves.

Boasted to be everything Earth wasn’t - clean, unsullied, safe - Lander learns upon arrival that Tranquility is anything but. New Independence has gone dark, and it soon becomes clear that he will have to fight a terrifying enemy to save their new home, forcing him back into the very life he’d thought he’d left behind on Earth.

Experience the start of an action-packed new military sci-fi epic from best-selling authors Josh Hayes (The Valor trilogy) and Devon C. Ford (After It Happened). Starcraft meets Titanfall in a thrilling battle for survival.

©2021 Aethon Books (P)2021 Audible, Inc. Fiction First Contact Military Science Fiction Space Opera
Well-paced Combat • Evocative Details • Seamless Writing • Exciting Series • Great Setup
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The story was well written but, I don’t care for all the swearing but given the John has written it makes sense I felt like I was part of the crew.

Extremely adventurous

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Overall performance and writing was outstanding. It reads like a first book and that is not a bad thing because the set up is very well done. It seriously annoys me when a series has a bad set up! Character development was at a great pace. I enjoyed how the story unfolded. I don't often enjoy two author books. This book changed my mind. Seamless writing and great story. Looking forward to book 2!

Great start to a new series!

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Action-packed and we’ll written. This was my first audiobook narrated by Scott Aiello and I enjoyed it immensely.

Great start to the series - looking forward to the next book!

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The 1st book in an exciting series.
As Earth's first colony planet is threatened by another "alien", a group of Earth colonists battle to regain control.

A New Exciting Series

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After a major-power war, the winning side sends an expedition to reinforce a new colony on an extra-solar planet. When they arrive, it seems that something has happened to the original colonists.

The reinforcing expedition has little in the way of weapons to deal with the newly discovered threat and the captain of the ship delivering them obstructs the colonists at every turn.

One of the two viewpoint characters is a discharged military hero, who takes up the challenge of investigating the situation, and eventually of resolving the problem. His character is well-drawn, with a complex personality and background. Once the story starts, while he is the primary driver of the plot, he doesn't change much. The other viewpoint character, his wife, has less screen time and a less-developed background, but is the more interesting character, with her relationship to the developer of the colony AI and need to overcome more personal challenges.

The setting is a bit sketched in, with the history on Earth more mentioned than explained and the situation on Tranquility left mostly to the combat scenes in the book. The ship that transports the colonists to the new system takes almost three years to arrive, which can't really be sublight (no time compression is mentioned), but also no super-light system is discussed either.

The details of the combat are evocative and well-paced, but there isn't much tactical complexity to the combat scenes that take up the majority of the book. The primary combat is undertaken by what are on the border between powered armor suits and mecha. The colonists have to make do with powered assist suits that have been modified to be field expedient suits. (Think "Bob Semple tank", frankly.) This probably works better than it should, but the suits are definitely at a disadvantage to the few remaining combat suits on Tranquility.

For my taste, at least, there's too much time spent on close combat between combat suits that result from frontal attacks by one side or the other. I'd rather have seen more effort spent on the world, the technology, and tactics than descriptions of blow-by-blow fight scenes.

I suspect this book will work better for other audiences, but for me, it was just OK. I'm not generally a fan of mecha, and while I like MilSF quite a bit, this didn't engage some of the complexities of the books in the genre I like better. If you're a mecha fan, this is done quite well; there are good reasons for the existence of at least the colony powered-assist suits and the conversion mostly makes sense. As it is, I'll read the next book eventually, but I have other priorities now.

Decent Mecha SF

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I look forward to hearing the next one. I don't do spoilers. It's a great series so far I couldn't stop listening. Till I got to the end the only thing to do now I was waiting for the new book and listened to it again.they keep you going all the way to the end! Check it out you won't regret it.

Wow what a Great start to a new series!

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Was looking for a sci-fi series to listen to after binging 40k stuff and it was quite refreshing. It's fun to listen to media about the future that is overall hopeful, but grim when it needs to be. The swearing and overt adult subject matter took some time to get use to it; mainly since sci-fi novels have a habit of using their own made up slang or dress everything in innuendos or old words to describe things. Still a very fun start to a series.

Giant Robots, Aliens, and References Oh My!

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From all the positive reviews, I was really expecting a gripping action packed book. That's not what the book is in my opinion. Action packed, definitely. Gripping, nope. Always something conveniently around to save the day. Characters could have been more fleshed out in my opinion.

This book is just okay

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At 62% I'm done. It's just too boring and so drawn out it's ridiculous. In almost 400 pages there's 2 things that will happen; they'll arrive on Tranquility and they'll find a way to kill the Queen of the Hive. That's it! No growth whatsoever. No world building. No nothing.

Up to this point there's no sex, and I don't expect there will be and the F-bomb was used 153 times.

As for the narration: Scott Aiello is a wonderful narrator but even he couldn't help this book.

Boring...

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Mech sequences are good, overall plot is a work in progress. Worth it for the mech stuff but only for so long

It’s all right

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