The Salvage Crew

Excellent narration! Nathan Fillion is an absolutely perfect fit for the narrator of this book. This was a sci-fi action/adventure that was filled with exciting moments that kept me interested throughout the entire story.

The first person POV was a great way to tell the story, and I really enjoyed it. This easy salvage mission turns into an absolute nightmare for this crew, and it was hard to pause the story. I had to know what would happen next!

I think this is perfect for any sci-fi fans. Readers that enjoyed To Sleep in a Sea of Stars would enjoy this one as well!

I was provided a gifted audio copy of this book for free. I am leaving my review voluntarily.

oh my goodness, how soon can they make this into a movie? I was drawn to the story by the synopsis, looked into the author and was fascinated by his story, then opened up the audiobook to Nathan Fillion reading me a story. Be still my heart!!
The story itself was highly enjoyable, tying in lowly salvage crew, an AI with a mind of it's own, some nefarious deeds and bad guys, and some verrrrry interesting new friends. Thanks to Netfalley for a review copy.

This book is so unexpected! It's a brilliant, technologically advanced world, yet still has all the political and business red tape and social dramas of today and yesterday. This story is an exploration of alien intelligence, artificial intelligence, and the experiment of combining the human mind with A.I.

The narrator is a human turned A.I. that is well and concisely explained. It's fascinating! The writing is somehow conversational and poetic--especially in that it contains actual poetry written by the A.I. The settings are so well described, the characters are realistic and developed. The story itself is dark and interesting. It's like a fantasy thriller that feels like sci-fi with a sort of dead pan style of humor that I absolutely adore. Particularly in the very beginning, I had an out loud chuckle or three. The whole story is so excellent and strange. The characters, philosophy, and poetry are Buddhist influenced in a neat and casual way--in contrast to fiction that is religiously influenced for religiousity's sake, rather it's not heavy handed or over explained.

This book is an incredible combination of science fiction, fantasy, dystopia, poetry, and philosophy. There's a dead-pan humor ever present as well as a lingering darkness, despair, and danger. My favorite combination. This will not be for everyone, but it's exactly the type of treasure that strums my heart strings and is candy for my brain. I was captivated from beginning to end. And that ending! I loved it, a well written tie up.

The narration is also unique. I enjoyed Nathan Fillion's voice and how he brought the narrator to life, but his voice also has a sort of deep and breathy Dan Carlan (of Hardcore History) quality that made it difficult to understand at a speed higher than 1.75--and even that was a bit fast, 1.5x was perfect. I usually listen to audiobooks at *at least* 2x speed. His voice matched the drama and humor very well, but was more like a podcast than book? So I both adored his narration and struggled with it; take that for whatever it's worth. It does make me wonder if I loved this as much as I did because of how well Fillion's voice/voice-acting fit the characters--would I love this equally had I read it in print?

Thank you NetGalley, Podium Audio, and author for a copy of this audiobook in exchange for my honest review!

When I heard there was a new space travel sci-fi book out and the audio version was narrated by NATHAN-freaking-FILLION, there was no stopping me from getting my hands on it. It literally sounded like the best possible Firefly substitute this nerd could get.

And it was, plus so very much more.

I had never heard of Yudhanjaya Wijeratne before The Salvage Crew, but I'm giving his body of work a good hard look now. This novel was technically intriguing, philosophically exciting, satisfyingly claustrophobic and suspenseful, and surprisingly irreverent all at once. Wijeratne packed such a rich bundle of everything I love about sci-fi into this one book, and as a result, has created a forever fan in me.

I don't want to give much away, but I must say I do love the AI point of view, when it's coming from a once-human consciousness. HAL in 2001 had his moments, but he was a human construct and couldn't give us the poetry (or feels) our Overseer does here. Or the existential inner dialogue.

As well, I appreciated the matter of fact ideas laid out about how true space travel could be achieved by mere humans. We have spent decades of sci-fi trying to figure out how a being with a ~80 year lifespan could travel bajillions of light years to distant quadrants without dilithium-fueled FTL speeds, worm holes or spore drives. But what if it's not hibernation we need to achieve to cross the universe, but rather uploading into artificial, exponentially longer-lived "bodies" or ships that can survive millenia? Apparently all the sentient beings are doing it -- we just need to get with the program!

A special thanks to Podium Audio and NetGalley who honored me with a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

There is no way you can go wrong with Nathan Fillion as a narrator. Even if your book is terrible (which this is not at all), Nathan Fillion would save it. This book was an interesting, funny, and enjoyable story even on its own, and Fillion only added to that. I had a great time following along with the adventures of this ragtag crew and their quirky, once-human Overseer. I loved that the Overseer was once human. It made him all the more interesting, and provided a fascinating contrast between human and machine and what it means to be both. I thought the rest of the crew was intriguing. They begin as a much smaller part of the story, with the Overseer taking center stage. However, as the story progresses and you learn more about them, they become deeper and more complex. This book could very easily become a caricature of what it was, but I thought Yudhanjaya Wijerantne avoided those pitfalls beautifully. I definitely think this story would lose something without Fillion's fantastic voice, but I do think this was a worthwhile story in its own right and I will be interested to see more from this author in the future.

I have a thing for snarky AIs, and once I saw this was narrated by Nathan Fillion, of course I requested this audiobook.

“I’m surrounded by idiots.”


Amber Rose – called OC by his crew – is a snarky AI who used to be human. He’s a Buddhist who writes poems in his spare time (absolutely awful poems, by the way) and he’s slowly working his way up the rank of AIs. His latest mission is to oversee the salvage of a UN colony ship that crashed on Urmahon Beta. It’s definitely not a prestigious assignment, and his ragtag crew – Simon, Anna and Milo – are, well, not even the C team. Plus the ship that dropped them off, helpfully called “Ship,” and is supposed to be their backup if anything goes wrong is also not the brightest bulb. When OC asks her to alert him to anything unusual in the planet’s orbit, the Ship helpfully sends him info about the planet’s two moons. At first, OC is resigned to a boring few months of ordering around his idiot crewmates, but things gradually take a turn for the worse. There’s giant megafauna, not a lot of helpful resources near their landing site, and, oh, indications that they may not be alone on the planet.

“But now I know exactly how useful dumb things can be.”


I loved OC as a character – all the wonderful snark I was promised! – and I loved how he gradually came to care for each of his crew members, even the particularly annoying Milo. Each of the characters was distinct and it reflected in their relationships with OC. At the beginning, a large part of the book is spent talking about the various tech that makes their salvage mission possible, from creating their hab modules to growing potatoes, and this reminded me a lot about everything I loved about The Martian. But as the story progresses, through humor, to horror, to thriller, what seems on the surface to be a run-of-the-mill scifi survival story turns into something much deeper.

It’s hard to talk too much about what happens in the later half of the book without going into spoilers, but one of the concepts is that of a “literary machine” – a non-organic entity that’s evolved beyond simplistic if/then commands (looking at you, Ship) and can actually create, like OC’s poetry. It’s a concept that’s been articulated before, of course, but I was captivated by that particular word choice. And like OC’s poetry, the book is general is heavily influenced by Buddhism because of OC’s human upbringing, from the style of poetry to how he reacts to the world around him to his highly humorous curses. Most of my knowledge of Buddhism comes from a pan-Asian art class back in college and I think I would’ve appreciated some aspects of the book more if I’d been more familiar.

“May your most precious assets spontaneously turn into goats. May those goats be reborn as lettuce.”


Nathan Fillion is perfect as as the narrator as OC dovetails nicely with the usual sarcastic types he usually plays. The book is mostly told from OC’s POV, and I think the only places the narration didn’t work as well for me were when it briefly switched to other characters. While some of them felt well defined (Anna and Milo), Simon and some spoilery others didn’t. Besides that, I thought the narration was excellent, especially when dealing with some of OC’s prolonged monologues and the action segments.

Overall, this was a thought-provoking read, and one that I’m still thinking about. I will definitely be looking up more of the author’s work!

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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RED DWARF REMIX?
I'm not suggesting for a second that Wijeratne's mind worked this way (at least I don't mean to), but this is the impression I got as this started.

The Red Dwarf TV Show/Novels had a couple of great ideas at the beginning—an AI that ran the ship, that had a strange personality, an odd sense of humor, and wasn't entirely reliable. The second was that the ship generated a holographic officer based on the memories and personality of one of a dead member of the crew (whoever was highest ranking/most needed among the dead). A long time ago, it had been determined that AI with memories and real emotions actually perform better than those not based on actual humans.

Our main protagonist and narrator in this novel is an AI, made from the memories and personality of an engineer who served his whole professional life in space (after leaving his family's farm). He's now in charge of a small salvage crew for the company Planetary Crusade Service, sent to a tiny planet Urmahon Beta to recover as much as they can from an old colony ship that presumably crashed there.

His role is Overseer, and his crew nicknames him OC. This is OC's first command, if it goes well—and a few others—he can move up to a larger, better body/command. In a few decades or so, he could work is his up to a large ship, overseeing a major operation. Again, that's if everything goes well.

EVERYTHING DOESN'T GO WELL
OC is promised an "A-Team" of a crew for his first command. He doesn't get one. They're not a B-Team either. There are not enough letters to describe how far this trio is from an A-Team. For that matter, I'm not sure OC is A-Team material either—they land far off-course (turbulence during descent, we're told).

Almost instantly, the crew starts falling apart, ignoring orders and protocol. They begin to build a base to work from, but get distracted by things like indigenous flora and fauna, personality conflicts, and evidence that suggests they may not be the only salvage crew on the planet (there's a rival company with bionic operators with aggressive tendencies).

From a rough start, it gets worse, and the next few weeks are a spiral of cascading failure, disease, injuries, strife, crop failure, questionable vodka distillation, bargain-basement tech, and...well, I can't keep going. It gets messy, and what starts off as a quirky, comedic version of The Martian with a side of Red Dwarf turns into something tense, taut, dark, and suspense-filled. It doesn't stay that way, depending on how you want to count things, ends up taking one or two other overall flavors, while never completing shedding the offbeat humor that characterized the book since the opening paragraph.

POETRY AND OTHER QUIRKS
I'm going to focus on OC, rather than the rest of the crew (and they are all worth writing about) to keep this short (and because you really need to get into spoilers to do a proper job of talking about the humans). He is funny. There's a snarky, offbeat humor to his narration and dialogue throughout.

He's also a poet. I'm not saying he's a good one, but he is one. Frequently in Fantasy novels (particularly older ones that wear their Tolkien-influence on their sleeves), you get a lot of poetry/songs/etc., but that's rarely a feature of Science Fiction novels. The Salvage Crew is the exception to this rule. OC writes it, recites it to his crew to encourage them, he quotes and ruminates on other's poetry...he's the most poetic AI I think I've ever encountered in a novel. He's also a Buddhist, and will often apply that to his situation.

He also has the best curses. He's frequently letting off steam by cursing his crew, PCS executives, or local fauna to a horrible future reincarnation. I could have listened to some of those for a solid hour.

FILLION'S NARRATION
It's tough to say for certain, but I think that Fillion raised this about a star in my book (maybe just a half). It's his voice, his charm that hooks you in and gets you to like, believe in and root for OC. That said, at some point, I stopped thinking of this as Fillion, and just let OC tell me a good story.

It's not the best narration I've ever heard, but it's really good and it made me hope that Fillion does more audiobooks.

CO-WRITTEN BY AI?
So, there was apparently actual AI software involved in the writing of this. I learned about this when I started writing this post, and I'm not sure I understood everything I skimmed (I didn't want to take the time to read carefully instead of just posting this). I'm intrigued by this notion, but am relieved to see that the software only "helped" with portions of the book and that Wijeratne was the final word.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT THE SALVAGE CREW?
Roughly the first half of the book* is about what I expected—an amusing SF adventure—and was a lot of fun to listen to. The rest of the book isn't what I expected from the premise in terms of story or tone. And I was riveted. There are portions of the book that get into more philosophical territories, and while I wasn't as interested in them as I think the novel wanted me to be, they were really well constructed and told.

* This is an estimate, I didn't jot down notes about when the tenor of the plot/novel changes)

I'm really glad I took a chance on this book, I'll definitely listen to future audiobooks by Fillion (assuming any are produced) and am probably going to be trying some of Wijeratne's other novels. I heartily recommend it to SF readers/listeners.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from Podium Audio via NetGalley in exchange for this post—thanks to both for this.

The Salvage crew is deceptively simple (and seemingly derivative) in it's first hundred pages or so. For a moment, I wondered if I'd accidentally picked up a book set in the HALO universe. There's more to this novel than meets the eye however.

What starts as a simple science fiction survival thriller (stranded on a planet, must be creative to survive, developing an almost sexual bond with a space volleyball, that kind of thing) quickly becomes much more than we see at the surface. We end in a very different way than we started -- and despite how simple a story concept that is, it seems rare and refreshing.

Nathan Fillion is an excellent narrator as well, injecting the internal monologue and external dialogue with his unique flavor of comedic timing. I would love to hear more from him.

The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my third novel by this author and I still think he's going strong as hell.

The shape and flavor of Salvage Crew is a pretty familiar one to readers of SF, of course. A crew comes to a hostile alien world, encounters many strange things that kill them, and makes discoveries that change everything.

But as always, HOW a thing is done is often much more important than WHAT is being done.

In this case, we're taking on another example of AI-ship narration, claustrophobic horror (even for the AI), and a slippery slope down a stop-gap defensive position that NONE of them are prepared for.

And the enemy?

Let's just say that there's no way any of us could have prepared against it.

Fortunately, it gives us a very satisfying conclusion that makes me want to read on and on. I'm reminded of We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and To Sleep in a Sea of Stars in a very fond way.

Oh, and as a side benefit, Nathan Fillon narrates the audio version!