It’s a good, light sort of listen, and I can see why and how it has been the inspiration for other great stories.
I can’t help but cringe at the choppy accents. I tried to tell myself that all these accents brought up by the author are from “Earth-like” colonies and would therefore sensibly have their own lingual differences… but then the narrator would pull a hokey Dick Van Dyke cockney accent that morphed to Scottish and then just “marbles in the mouth” before finding cockney again… rather jarring. I also find it funny that no matter where an American character travels in this universe, he’ll always pause to ask “where’s that accent from?” marking any accent different from his as worthy of remark even as his wizard, simian and feline crew mates disembark behind him. You’d think intergalactic travel would all but breed that out of a person.
I dislike that things are so simplified in terms of terraforming and naming the continents. How boring to try and force every planet into the same shape as the one humans set off from! how boring to name each planet’s continents the same as the “original” planet? It’s all painted backdrops and paper mache trees for this author.
He got colonization right. The disgust shown by his characters as they observe a well-established segregation and maltreatment of a planet’s people from the colonizing human population was a good (and all too real) mirror to Earthly goings on.