The Unsung by Scott Bartlett is a first person science fiction story set in the future, where humanity is divided between living in the real world, and a virtual reality world. By uploading yourself to giant servers, one lives out ones life in a ‘better’ reality with everything one could wish for. Of course, despite being the far future, there are still real life pirates around..

We follow Commander Joe Pikeman, a guy who’s very old school anti-‘virtual life’ minded, and his mission to track down the pirates who have destroyed his home town. We encounter pirate lords, have space battles, hear about a very cliché daughter/wife plot, and get a tour around this highly digitalized world.

The book as such wasn’t bad. It is pure space opera, with space battles, plenty of action, virtual life styles, and a good mixture of future technology. The main character is likeable, and something is happening on almost every page, along with plenty of action scenes. In addition I found it quite well written, with scenes and dialog flowing very nicely.

The plot wasn’t too complex, but I frankly found the entire scifi side of it too superfluous. The ideas are no where near novel, and most of them have been overused way too much. The upload to the virtual world wasn’t fleshed out sufficiently, and the space pirates and space battles was run of the mill. And the main character acts like he’s a superhero. And then there was the very cliché daughter and wife side plots. For some reason the teeange daughter is Indiana Jones, a super hacker, super spy, etc., which didn’t fit at all, as if she came straight out of a super cliché young adult book.
The first four chapters were mostly info dump, and there wasn’t much of a story to start things up with. In general the whole book was riddled with a lot of useless and forced details throughout, so I got the feeling that the author had done a lot of random world building, and wanted to include it all. I think another good round of editing would have done good. Second part of the book was the best for me, when all the minor useless details got out of the way, and the story was the center.

I listened to the audiobook version, and really enjoyed the narration by Mark Boyett, which fit the story quite nicely.

For fans looking for a well written, light headed scifi space opera with a plot that isn’t too deep, but with a story that will keep you guessing as to where it is going, with a likeable main character, this is a good pick. Just don’t expect something completely novel that pushes any litterary boundaries.

I received this audiobook for free, in return for a review.