At its core, Project Transhuman is an excellently constructed inversion of the Pinocchio story. The overarching themes and exploration of what it means to be human provide a fascinating perspective that’s sure to get your mind turning. The actual plot of the story lets those themes fade a bit into the background, letting the chapter-to-chapter flow of the narrative be character-driven, and not spending much time trying to hammer in any particular philosophical conclusions for the listener. Overall, an excellent use of science fiction to explore the human condition. However, the actual plot and characters in question are somewhat less intriguing.
Too often, I found myself perplexed at the actions or conclusions of the characters. Sure, they’re each flawed, or naïve, or broken in their own ways that leads them to make mistakes, but sometimes it felt like they were making mistakes just to highlight to the listener that the character was imperfect, or because a more correct decision would be inconvenient for the plot, and not because it was actually true to the character. Characters who were clearly established as being competent at a particular skill failing utterly to apply that skill later in the story, and that sort of thing.
Ultimately, there was one, singular aspect to the story that kept me from listening past book 3 of the collection. A certain character makes a VERY bad decision. Unlike some of bad decisions I mentioned above, however, this decision was entirely foreseeable as an inevitability in a way that should have been apparent to the character’s friends and allies, and yet they continuously enable the character in both the lead-up to and aftermath of the decision. If this was treated as a major crisis of morality, then it could have been a dramatic turn in the story. Instead, the narrative poses the situation as though the issue at hand is not “this heroic character has committed a horrifying crime” but “people might find out that this heroic character has committed a horrible crime” as though the tragedy enacted by the character is overshadowed by the potential of facing personal consequences.
This probably won’t be as big of a hang-up for most people as it was for me, and there’s still a good chance you will be able to appreciate this collection in its entirety for the great example of sci-fi that it is. But, I must warn you that there’s a chance you will stop being able relate to the protagonists as “the good guys” after a certain point, even though the books carry on as though they were.