Shakedowners cover art

Shakedowners

Shakedowers Series, Book 1

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Shakedowners

By: Justin Woolley
Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
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About this listen

Some starship captains explore strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations. Some lead missions of discovery through wormholes to the other side of the galaxy. Then there's Captain Iridius B. Franklin, someone who spent too long seeking out strange new bars and new alien cocktails.

After graduating bottom of his class at Space Command Academy, Iridius Franklin hasn't had the glamorous career he envisioned - instead he hauls cargo ships full of mining waste, alien land whale dung, and artificially intelligent toy dogs across the stars.

Iridius does have talent, though - he is exceptionally good at breaking starships. So, when not hauling freight, he is captain of a shakedown crew, a skeleton crew used to test newly constructed ships for faults before the real crew takes over.

While on a routine shakedown mission aboard the FSC Gallaway, soon to be pride of the Federation Fleet, Earth is attacked by an unknown alien life-form. With the galaxy in chaos, Captain Iridius B. Franklin finds himself, unqualified, understaffed, and completely unprepared, in command of the most advanced starship in the galaxy.

Now, he just needs to not break it.

©2021 Justin Woolley (P)2022 Tantor Adventure Fiction Humorous Science Fiction Space Opera Space Interstellar Transportation Comedy

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All stars
Most relevant  
Entertaining and funny . On similar lines to the tv series The Orville. Best book I’ve read for a while.

Very enjoyable

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Immediately likeable characters, great humour, well researched and very well narrated. I really enjoyed this. Hope udotoo

Great Story for sci fi lovers

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Great performance, interesting and funny concept. Will definitely moving onto the next book. Can imagine this as a Red Dwarf storyline.

Fun space adventure

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good story. only downside is now have to pay to start sequel. oh well, here we go again. well worth a listen

the narration was brilliant

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Great romp through space. we'll read and preformed, excellent start to a series. looking forward to the next

Excelent

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there were times when he was confused between rimmer or or lister but added interest.

Great fun and well worked

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humourous character based storytelling with a heavy dollop and big nods to the big sci-fi characters and stories that inspired, fun

tongue in cheek irreverence

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excellent story of the possibilities of what our future might be like with the onset of AI. One word, dangerous!!

episodes of comedy mixed in with sheer grit

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OK ish Sci-fi story but to advertise it as "Douglas Adams like" is a slap in the face to that great author, Shame on your PR team

Douglas Adams this is NOT

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Amateurly written--telling where showing was needed, shaky pacing, a camera POV that flattens the narrative, and weak humor that doesn't quite manage to be funny but does demolish dramatic tension. The plotting is mildly competent, even engaging toward the end.

You can say it's a hard sci-fi but only because it's plotted in that unimaginative way where you get the mandatory rogue AI (that in light of Chat GPT as of 2023 already aged badly), a Star Trek weaksauce of technobabble (with all the ST weaknesses and none of the strengths), standard FTL drives and plasma engines, and all the plot promises fulfilled EXACTLY the way you saw them 4 thousand times in D category movies and tv shows, down to the ramming of the ship into the enemy and the last second save of the main guy.

I was going to give it a 3 star, maybe even 3.5 rounded up to 4 because it ended with a genuinely exciting narrative promise, namely that the next book will treat the invasion of the race the AI came to prepare the galaxy against. I was actually about to press buy on the next one but then a pathologic mix of dread and paranoia made me check the blurbs and, lo and behold, the author decided to make them about something else, something MUCH LESS INTERESTING. Some trite time travel crap he's confident he can write probably from memory.

I'm over incompetent writing that can't identify its own narrative promises.

Gets 2* because I managed to finish it, which usually happens if the author didn't add anything terribly annoying or toxic. Granted, it was free on Audible, or I wouldn't have picked it up by the blurb to being with (it's obvious it's nothing original).

Amateurly written but managed to finish freebie

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