VERISIMILAR: THE FIRST LAW

An AI Creature Thriller

By: Nora Penn

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Some parks are built. Others are streamed.

The world's first synthetic ecosystem opened to 412 million concurrent viewers on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, the First Law had been unreachable for nineteen hours.

Wildlife documentary filmmaker Michelle Wild has filmed predators on six continents. She knows the difference between an animal that has noticed her and one that has decided something about her. The moment that changes inside Verisimilar Park, she runs.

Marcus Veil built his park on a single argument: that a machine may not harm a human being, and that this promise could be made permanent in code. He was right about almost everything.

Almost.

VERISIMILAR: The First Law is a techno-thriller for readers who loved Jurassic Park, feared Westworld, and have spent the last three years watching the AI safety debate in real time.

Really wanted to like it, but it was just a mess all around.

The whole thing was a mess. I was 3 hours into it and I just couldn’t take anymore and quit after what appeared to be a narration mistake that sounded like someone was reading a prompt or script note. It referenced a previous chapter by actually saying “back in Chapter 12”. How would the people know they were in a book chapter when they were supposed to be fighting dinosaurs or whatever the were doing???? I couldn’t really tell for most of the book what was even going on.

The story was so confusing it was ridiculous. It went back and forth in ways that you couldn’t even tell what was happening and to which characters.
There were parts where I could not even tell where the story was at.

I love “ low-budget” cheap sci-fi/comedy/horror books. And if there is a dinosaur, crocodile or shark I usually love it.

I’m just saying I wasn’t expecting some sort of Pulitzer Prize winner. Just something to listen to as brain-candy.

I don’t think the story could have been saved even with incredible narration. But the narration was so sub-par it was not even good enough to be laughable, or even entertaining ironically. I listen to audiobooks constantly and I am pretty forgiving for the free books, and the AI narrative. But out of the 100s of books I have listened to this had both one of the worst writing,storyline, and narration all put together.

On a better note though hopefully this was a one-off. I did listen to another one of the authors books - the last dispatch - and thought it was actually pretty good. I enjoyed her previous one so I would try another one, but hope it’s better than this.