Tales From The Arm & Bar

Book II of The Irredente Chronicles

De: J. Patrick Sutton

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Revised Edition.

Tales from the Arm & Bar, begins four years after Henryk Burgred, illegitimate genovariant child of a deceased patrician military officer and a slum prostitute, goes to the family homeworld Plum Grove. Having been rescued from almost certain death on Edom by his uncle, and having earned the wrath of the Irredente hegemony by killing a senior naval intelligence official, Henryk for the first time in his life finds a pastoral place of peace and comfort at the Burgred family estates on Plum Grove. There he settles into his privileged but duty-bound birthright. The reactionary eunuch priest Hersey has traveled to the Beyond (the Bar End). There, Hersey -- accompanied by his symbiant companion Tildy -- has visited the many strange, genovariant-populated worlds organized under the authority of the Mediant, finally landing upon the world of the Mediant itself, where Hersey is forever changed. He is commanded by The Mediant to return to the Irredente hegemony to spread a gospel of toleration for all life -- including inorganic sentient life driven into hiding by the Irredente prohibitions on technology. Tales from the Arm & Bar follows the separate trajectories of Henryk and Hersey through 750 pages of adventure, peril, revelation, and redemption until the lives of many individuals begin to converge upon a single, mysterious point: the planet Innisfree. Book III of the Irredente Chronicles, The Empire Within, is also available for download on Amazon.

Good Story, Terrible Narration

A good story that is worth a read or a listen, but on occasion tends to wax philosophic a little too much. The author had his thesaurus handy for this series, to either impress the reader or make the atmosphere seem futuristic. The author’s grasp of physics is a bit fuzzy, but that’s not uncommon even in science fiction. The audiobook AI narration is atrocious. Words and names are frequently mispronounced, and even that had no consistency. Emphasis and “emotion” are often used where none is appropriate and vice versa. Overall, a decent way to pass the time on a long drive.