Notes on series:
NOTE: don’t buy the “The Yanthus Job” novella. For some reason, it’s included in both “Aye Robot” (skip to Chapter 32 to find it) and “A Scammer Darkly” (skip to Chapter 41 to find it). Also, don’t worry about “The Chicolini Incident” not being on Audible – it’s included in “Out of the Soylent Planet.”
I’ve enjoyed the whole “Rex Nihilo” series. It’s typically quite entertaining and clever! The author does sometimes stretch too much for the sake of strained puns, and sometimes devolves into simple Star Wars references instead of being more original – but overall I really enjoy these books!
Some of the books are read by Anna Marie Lewis, and some by J.D. Ledford. I prefer Ledford’s narration. She has a broader range of character voices, but also brings so much life and personality to her characters – and I prefer how she pronounces the name “Vlack” like “black” whereas Lewis reads it like “flock.”
Not everything is perfectly consistent across books. The author himself pokes fun at this, breaking the fourth wall in one part where the protagonist bemoans how sometimes he’s an idiot and sometimes a genius. Or there’s how he routinely uses “DNA scrambling” to hide his identity and change his body, yet apparently always looks exactly the same in the course of the books. There’s more nitpicking that could be done. This isn’t high literature by any means. But these are engaging stories about a foolish flim-flam artist and his long-suffering, loyal robot, SASHA.
Notes on this book:
I’m not into WWII stories, and was wondering what the author was thinking by taking a sci-fi con artist into such a world. However, I enjoyed the story more than I expected. It has a definite Star Trek like flavor – how previous contact with an alien culture resulted in strange happenings somewhere between a cargo cult and war. The result is very silly, sometimes groan-worthy, but is still very amusing. (Although I thought something was going to happen with all those machine gun nests – I was expected a payoff that never happened.) This is another classic Rex Nihilo misadventure.