A below mediocre book, with a horrible audiobook

The Fall of Man is a science fiction story written by Mitchell White, about a post-apocalyptic future where Uberbots have brought humanity to its knees. We follow Thomas, a robot programmer, in his quest to survive in this new world.

I didn’t particularly enjoy this one. The story was okay, not anything too complex, but it did the job. The writing as such was acceptable, but the dialogs were quite simplistic, often juvenile, and felt very unnatural. Combined with the audiobook voices, which I found absolutely horrible, it made the dialogs much worse and cringe worthy (More on this below).

I don’t think the author is an experienced novel writer, and/or very young, and it shows quite a lot. Most of the characters are quite clichéd, and acts extremely juvenile in their behavior. The main character was likeable, but quite 1-dimensional, as we don’t learn a lot about him or his background, which is a pity. Apparently he didn’t know the world had gone to smithereens, which I found weird. And then he has a shallow teenage romance with one of the other characters, which to me felt quite out of place.

The overall world building also lacked quite a bit. We are in a post-apocalyptic world where robots have brought humanity down. We don’t learn anything about how they did it, just that it happened, which I find quite questionable, as they appear strong but not outstandingly intelligent. Any major army would likely be able to beat them down I’d wager. We have humans scattered all over the place, but there doesn’t seem to be much communication going on between human settlements. Why is that? Why has everything just gone to hell, and how did the robots achieve it?

One of the biggest problems with the story, is that there is a LOT of ‘pocket philosophy, ie. shallow discussions on what is to be ‘an ideal citizen’. I’m fine with the government having shaped society into a specific mindset, but the characters, especially the main character, just keeps mentioning how they should be ‘an ideal citizen’ again, and again, and again. The characters keep discussing this, and they are either completely for or against it, and come with these superficial arguments as to why the are for or against it. It doesn’t add anything to the story, but it takes up soooo much of the time. The author tries to mix it into his own take on Asimov’s robot laws, but it doesn’t work at all, when there are logical fallacies everywhere in these discussions and robot behaviors. In the second half of the book the plot moves very slowly, and everything dwindles into these meta-philosophical discussions, and questionable actions by cliché characters.

Audible lists the book as narrated by Bernard Hughes, and he did quite a fine job. I am not sure if he also did the main character Thomas, but he was generally also good. But, that is also where the good stuff ends.
Every single other character in the book, and there are quite a few, has their own distinct narrator, and pretty much all of them are so monotonous that they appear completely misplaced. It is as if all the character narrators have been given the lines they are supposed to read aloud, and then they have done that, without any consideration for what their characters are actually doing in the story. In addition, since the dialog writing is generally quite bad and unnatural, they stand out even more, because you’ll have the good narrator saying something, and then a random person interjects their monotonously spoken short lines. It really does a bad job for the audiobook!
At first I thought the character narrators had to have been AI-generated, but some of them clearly have been recorded with very low quality microphones, which stand out a lot, so I’d guess these are actual human narrators? I can only assume it sounded great in principle, to have all characters voiced by individual narrators, but in practice it just doesn’t work at all when they are that bad. Mind you, I usually really enjoy full cast productions, so it is not the mix of voices I dislike. It is the production values here I really dislike.

Overall a fine albeit simple science fiction story, that is brought down by bad dialogs, cliché characters, endless superfluous philosophy discussions, and an audiobook production which is borderline awful. If you are a 14 year old teenager that enjoy robots, then this is likely something you’d find this to be a deep book, but I would not recommend getting the audiobook at all. It should probably have been marketed towards young adults, with a younger main characters, and would have benefited from some agressive beta readers.

I received this audiobook for free in return for a review. I have no affiliation with the author, the narrators, the publisher, or their pets (Although I am sure the latter are quite nice!).

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