morgs

Unless the Audible version I heard was a wildly lost translation, this is simply not a good nor well written book. The many intriguing concepts (an extra ⭐ for the handful in there) were consistently undermined by overtly stale, flat characters and some laughably shlock counterparts to the intrigue (TriSolarans, wait, what?). All blended to create a singularly enervating experience. So many wasted opportunites by an author who clearly struggles to either grasp, and most certainly express, the nuance of human emotions and experience.

Facinating speculative science based musings on a spacebound humanity adapting against insurmountable odds in the far and cold reaches of space (yet much less cliched than that soundbite).

This was an exhausting listen. The Audible narrator, Daniel Roueche, delivers the text with a bizarre cadence that feels like a Mormon-themed AI &/or someone struggling to overcome a verbal impediment (on googling I read "hyper-articulated", yet to my non mormon, non US ears it sounded decidedly inarticulate). It is robotic, distracting, and lacks any natural human flow and would at least be ironic, and ironically forgivable, if this actually was read by AI. As for the content, it seems an obtuse treatise of an "unexamined life". Bledsoe presents his series of extraordinary claims with an overt absence of critical reflection or depth (I have zero qualms accepting all of the accounts as "real"). It reads like a teenagers blow by blow diary of cool stuff they did in the holidays, except it goes for decades, and has UFOs and stuff. In this void of spiritual or psychological insight, the narrative seems to exist to repeatedly self-validate. A huge portion of the book is dedicated to Bledsoe "showing off" about which high-level officials or NASA "cool kids" he's hanging out with now, coz he's not actually crazy or evil like his Baptist brethren claim, but rather a messenger of a "ufo of god" (wait, what?). Instead of leaning into the mystery of the phenomena, he seems more interested in using these sightings to humble brag, alongside hokey characterisations that start right with the title. The true value of this book is this: it is not about what the author thinks it is. Note: if you need a salve, or a better intro, to "the phenomena", try: "Earth a love story" Robin Lassiter (a deeply moving experiencer narrative, instilled with as much wisdom, growth as it has mystery),"Dimensions" or "Passport to Magonia" by Jacques Vallée (an objectively scientific inquiry), "American Cosmic" by Dr. D.W. Pasulka (a similiar, more recent accounting of myriad cases).