Dauntless (Dramatized Adaptation)

The Lost Fleet, Book 1

By: Jack Campbell

Narrated by: full cast, Marlon Dance-Hooi, Gerald Hill, Kymberley Cochrane, Erin Lin, Matthew Pauli, Ian DePriest, Zoleka Vundla, Andrew Quilpa, Jonathan Lee Taylor, Debi Tinsley, Todd Scofield

The first dramatized audiobook in the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series!

The Alliance has been fighting the Syndics for a century—and losing badly. Now its fleet is crippled and stranded in enemy territory. Their only hope is a man who's emerged from a century-long hibernation to find he has been heroically idealized beyond belief....

Captain John “Black Jack” Geary’s exploits are known to every schoolchild. Revered for his heroic “last stand” in the early days of the war, he was presumed dead. But a century later, Geary miraculously returns and reluctantly takes command of the Alliance Fleet as it faces annihilation by the Syndics.

Appalled by the hero-worship around him, Geary is nevertheless a man who will do his duty. And he knows that bringing the stolen Syndic hypernet key safely home is the Alliance’s one chance to win the war. But to do that, Geary will have to live up to the impossibly heroic “Black Jack” legend....

Adapted from the novel and produced with a full cast of actors, immersive sound effects and cinematic music!

Performed by Marlon Dance-Hooi as Narrator, Gerald Hill as John Geary, Erin Lin as Tanya Desjani and Kymberley Cochrane as Victoria Rione. With additional performances by Zoleka Vundla, Matthew Pauli, Todd Scofield, Yasmin Tuazon, Andrew Quilpa, Jonathan Lee Taylor, Keith Richards, Jameson Hunt, Andrew Mimms, Christopher Williams, Eric Messner, Christopher Walker, Debi Tinsley, Matthew Bassett, Ken Jackson, Vanessa Thurlow, Emlyn McFarland, Nora Achrati, Jonathon Church, Karen Novack, Crystal Judkins, Donald Guzzi, and Bradley Foster Smith.

©2006 Jack Campbell (P)2025 Graphic Audio LLC

basic mistakes in supporting casts or background characters

the story is fine, but what this version shows the lack of care of the work piece basic mistakes of details and makes the diverse background characters into a male voice even if it was explicitly a female character. also having the narrator not be the same voice actor of the main protagonist feels distorting while telling first person story.

Great story, D- production

The lost fleet is an amazing story. This dramatization does not do it justice. There are many production errors such as bad edits, mispronounced words, vocal effects that don’t align with the story details, etc. The sound effects are often incorrect, such as sounds of stabbing when a person is being shot. The worst part is the absolutely lifeless acting of several characters. It consistently gets the tone wrong so that the meaning of the sentence is lost. If you want to get the full experience of this amazing saga, skip this version and go listed to the Christian Rommel narration.

Suspicious mistakes

Several times the narrator describe a character as female only to immediately be represented by a male voice actor. Clumsy and amateur or lazy A I.

A missed opportunity

This is a review for the dramatized adaptation, not the underlying book. I dearly love the lost fleet books and have read Dauntless already a couple times before this and can't say enough about how wonderful they are as military science fiction. This review focuses on the Graphic Audio dramatic adaptation of the book.

The cast does a very good job. They really do bring these characters to life. It did take some getting used to after listening to the narrator of the audiobook version of the lost Fleet books, but I think.Gerald Hill does a good job of bringing Black Jack to life. Kymberley Cochrane in particular is excellent as Victoria Rione. I was less enthused with the narrator, he was a bit too perky for me.

My first comment was that the "movie in your mind" relied way too much on narration. Much more of the story could've been moved into dialogue in action. I thought the script was a bit lazy.

The production values can only be described as poor. The music was a drone that seemed to always be there, and had little or nothing to do with what was happening. The producer should really watch a television show and see how music can be effectively used and not just background noise. Sound effects were only minimally used and mostly bleeps. We're in a massive space battle. Why was there no sound of that? The other major flaw was that, in nearly all cases, the actors sound like they are in a studio in front of a high-quality microphone. They do not sound like they are in a conference room or on the bridge or in quarters. A decent sound engineer could've come up with ambience and effects to make rooms sound realistic. About the only audio facts are the communication's messages and for that they just apply a band pass filter to it and call it a day. If this had been the sound for a television program it would've been blatantly obvious that the sound didn't match the settings.

There were multiple editing mistakes were a sentence was repeated twice.

I love the idea of dramatic adaptations, and they can be very well done. The recent Audible Pride and Prejudice was an example of how good this genre can be. I hope the producers will read reviews like this and hire better sound engineers and orchestrators.

repeated sentences and some great characters now bland.

multiple times the narrator repeated the same sentence twice. and Carabali for instance has a unsure voice not indictive of her marine background.