Zivan reviewed Beginner's Guide to Invading Earth by Gerhard Gehrke
Review of "Beginner's Guide to Invading Earth" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This is my second Gerhard Gehrke novel.
While not perfect, his novels are fun to read and come at familiar tropes from a slightly oblique angle that is refreshing.
A conspiracy around first contact, but who are the conspirators?
Frustrations around maintaining the computer infrastructure that keeps civilization running without referencing clippie or Microsoft even once.
As an audiobook consumer I tend to miss out on independent authors. Only some of Gehrke's works are available in audio and I accidentally got this one without noticing that it is narrated by Virtual Voice. Since I got it on sale for 4$ I didn't feel cheated.
As a person with low vision that uses text-to-speech to access his iPhone all day, TTS isn't new to me. The narration was better than I'm used to with voices that need to run on a smartphone in real time and be very responsive.
I'd say …
This is my second Gerhard Gehrke novel.
While not perfect, his novels are fun to read and come at familiar tropes from a slightly oblique angle that is refreshing.
A conspiracy around first contact, but who are the conspirators?
Frustrations around maintaining the computer infrastructure that keeps civilization running without referencing clippie or Microsoft even once.
As an audiobook consumer I tend to miss out on independent authors. Only some of Gehrke's works are available in audio and I accidentally got this one without noticing that it is narrated by Virtual Voice. Since I got it on sale for 4$ I didn't feel cheated.
As a person with low vision that uses text-to-speech to access his iPhone all day, TTS isn't new to me. The narration was better than I'm used to with voices that need to run on a smartphone in real time and be very responsive.
I'd say the experience was mediocre, but not frustrating. I only caught the TTS in a couple of mistakes.
I'm morally opposed to Virtual Voice audiobooks, but must admit that this novel wouldn't be available to me otherwise. Getting it from Audible just saved me the work of getting the eBook without DRM or stripping the DRM and converting it to audio with a TTS myself.
I do fear that now that it is available in Virtual Voice, even if successful, the chances that it will ever be narrated by a human are slim.