Let’s be honest: these are not stunning literary achievements. This is not Ursula K LeGuin, nor is the The Name of the Wind. It’s a short book, and it’s free, and there are sequels, and it covers space stuff. That’s good enough for a listen. During which you’ll find that you probably like the main character, and the setup is at least intriguing, and there’s no real plot to speak of. So, a few hours gone but it was nice background while you washed the dishes or whatever.
What surprised me was that, while I was listening to this otherwise kind of forgettable nothing of a book, that I was smiling. Fairly frequently. So I picked up the next in the series–also free–and found it to be 100% the same thing: no real plot, nothing really happens, MC is likeable enough… and for some reason I’m smiling while listening.
I ended up buying the whole set, and the next three in the follow-on series with the same characters–a trilogy that does have some plot, for once, but which is also marred by the MC constantly walking into walls of his own making. By then I was done, and don’t really plan to return to this world. But it was overall a fun journey.