The Ships of Earth by Orson Scott Card (Audiobook Review)

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Title: The Ships of earth
Series: Homecoming, book 3
Author: Orson Scott Card
Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
Copyright: 2008, Blackstone Audio
Duration: 12 hours, 50 minutes
Genres: science fiction
Filed in: Audiobook Reviews
Review copy provided by Blackstone Audio.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: With the continuing failure of the Oversoul, the artificially intelligent guardian computer of the planet Harmony, the human colonists have begun to repeat the devastations of war and conquest wrought on Earth.
To repair itself and avert disaster, the Oversoul has called a group of 16 refugees from the fallen city of Basilica to a hidden, abandoned spaceport where the ancient starships lie. Now Wetchik, Nafai, and all their family must brave the desert wastes and cross the wide continents, guided by the voice of the Oversoul, to await the command to prepare the great interstellar ships for flight again. But among this group, not all have chosen their exile, and the angry resentment of those who were forced to join will make the difficult journey harder.
©1994 Orson Scott Card; (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

AUDIOBOOK REVIEW: Humans came to the planet Harmony, fleeing the destruction they had unleashed on their home world, Earth. They planned carefully, building a sophisticated AI, which they called the Oversoul, to watch over their descendants, and when the time was right, to lead them back home. After 40 million years on Harmony, that time has finally come, and the Oversoul begins to act. Choosing carefully from the planet’s inhabitants, the Oversoul selects eight men and eight women to make the long voyage home.
This is exactly the job the Oversoul was designed for, and it does its job well. Through an intricate series of plots and sub-plots, the Oversoul pries the chosen sixteen away from the only lives they have ever known, and sends them into the desert for what is sure to be a long and difficult voyage. Eventually, they must reach a secret location on Harmony where no human has been for 40 million years: the ancient spaceport where the ships of Earth still lie in wait.
The Ships of Earth is the third book in Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series, and covers about eight years of time. Young Nafai and his family, sixteen people in all, have been led into the desert to begin the journey of their lives. Of course, the most important thing to consider in starting a colony is babies, and that’s mostly what we get in this third volume. During eight years of wandering around the planet, the group grows from sixteen, to around forty, and they haven’t even reached the spaceships yet.
In my audiobook review for book two of this series, I commented that Orson Scott Card was taking along time to get somewhere, and I felt that was true with book three as well. It took them eight years for crying out loud! I can’t help but think this series would have been just as good without books 2 and 3.
Anyway, Card keeps the story going with the same old conflicts. Youngest family member Nafai has been chosen by the Oversoul to lead, and his older brothers resent that. They resent it so much in fact that they attempt to kill Nafai several times so that they can all go back home. The Oversoul always steps in to save Nafai, and the plots of Nafai’s older brothers grow a bit wearisome after a while.
Stefan Rudnicki narrates this entire series of audiobooks. You would be hard pressed to find a more solid narrator than Rudnicki, as fans of sci-fi audiobooks already know. He has a good voice for reading and has a good pace. These books contain a lot of foreign names for people and places and Rudnicki handles the tricky pronunciations deftly.
Okay, hopefully the dull part of this story is over. At the end of the book, they finally reach the ships and begin to prepare for the trip to Earth. I don’t feel like this is much of a spoiler since we’ve known all along that they would, in fact, eventually be going to Earth.

CHECK OUT THESE OTHER AUDIOBOOK REVIEWS:
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card (Audiobook Review)
The Memory Of Earth by Orson Scott Card (Audiobook Review)
The Call Of Earth by Orson Scott Card (Audiobook Review)

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If you like this audiobook review, you can purchase the audiobook here:
Get “The Ships of Earth”, book 3 in the Homecoming series by Orson Scott Card (Unabridged Audiobook) from Blackstone Audio.

This audiobook review is based on the unabridged audiobook.
Audiobook review by Steven Brandt
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