If Terry Goodkind read The Phoenix Project, got stoned, and decided to write a story about space trading, it might still be better than this, because at least it would be weird. This is the flattest plot arc I’ve ever encountered.
18-year old Ishmael Wong joins an interstellar trading vessel out of desperation and demonstrates the effectiveness of being an earnest, hard worker, and also reinvents every wheel to the great praise of his coworkers (most of whom are attractive women).
Despite it being hundreds of years in the future, he somehow turns a profit by buying goods on one space station and then travelling for weeks to sell it at another. Who cares if planets can support millions or billions of inhabitants, they clearly can’t produce diverse commodity goods.
Despite this nonsensical setting full of vanilla characters with generic 20th century names, I didn’t hate listening to this book. It wasn’t very stressful, and it was free, so it did successfully fill the time. (note that almost an hour of this book is a preview of the next book, so it doesn’t fill very MUCH time)