Fathomless

Mega What?

I usually like Beck's stories although the last couple of books have too many stupid female characters. I also generally like Mangan's narration because of his tone and occasional pronunciations that are more amusing than annoying. This book is different and it was a struggle to keep listening. The first time he said "mega loden" I thought about returning the book. I knew how to pronounce that when I was eight years old.

The scenarios were ridiculous. For example, after the trio tried to escape to the island and had only three fading lights, they kept all three on while they stood around and talked. Turn off two of them! They finally did, but geez...does no one think? The kidnapping of the Russian billionaire was not fully explained. Dozens of people die and this meg is supposed to remain a secret? Whatever.

A main problem here is that there is no perspective from the fish. Steve Alten's Meg books tell us how megs perceive prey, senses heartbeats, can function without sight. In this book, our heroes think they can out-paddle it by going slow, or out-swim it by being quiet (but still talking loudly in the water--go figure) or throwing around a bunch of debris to confuse it. I also did not care for how he had the characters decide that the fish was "evil" and how he portrayed the environmentalists. Some can be a bit too obsessive and naive, but these characters crossed the line into total idiocy. And we are to believe that the helicopter pilot managed to lure the meg several miles away from the sinking boat, then after the chopper was pulled into the water the pilot swam at least two miles back to the boat. In the dark, in the ocean, that would be incredible enough, but she managed to do it in what seemed to be about half an hour. I could not get a handle on time in this novel.

To be fair, the Sonya character was very good and Beck does have a great imagination. The best scene was with the poor floating whale, the helicopter, and the coast guard guy who tried to figure out what happened to it.

However, Beck's statement in the afterward that the warming seas have nothing to do with man-caused climate change was just too much.

20 of 20 people found this review helpful

Good story, weak narration

I like this story, but I certainly don't love it. The writing and pace are very good but at times the interactions between characters seems forced, particularly with the dialogue. It doesn't happen too often, but enough to be noticeable. Also, a pet peeve of mine is seeing the same vocabulary repeated too often, and "Stygian" was used 5-7 times. Too redundant.

Sean Mangan's voice is pleasant enough, but he horribly butchers certain pronunciations. What's more, he mispronounces "megalodon," and the word is used somewhere near 100 times. Absolutely brutal to listen to! He reads it as meg-ah-LO-don, as opposed to MEG-a-la-don or the more common MEG-la-don. Even then, he sometimes changes it to meg-AL-o-don. A more common word, abyss, is
read as A-biss as opposed to uh-BISS. There were others too. Please look these things up, Sean. Also, his reading of sarcasm is bland, and sometimes down right chipper, and there are several other points where the dialogue was not intoned properly.

If I come across another book narrated by Mangan I will hesitate to buy it, though I think he deserves another shot. If I don't hear an improvement then he will go on the DO NOT LISTEN TO list, and I
Will certainly not be trying him out on another Beck novel. I would like to try another of his books with a different voice.

20 of 21 people found this review helpful

Who taught this guy how to prounounce...

Would you consider the audio edition of Fathomless to be better than the print version?
Ok I don't know who taught this guy how to pronounce Charcaridon Megaladon, but that person has even managed to annoy my 5 year old (She walked through the room and is a shark week fanatic and corrected the narrator on her way to the bathroom. Then again on her way back through.)!

Honestly it is a good story and would have been a great read, but this promounciation issue came close to killings the book for me. It really is THAT BAD. I mean seriously has this person never heard of this shark before? Ok. But it's in the book easily over 50 times. You would have thought someone would correct it!

Great story had me laughing, and groaning in a few places because "you just knew" what was coming next. But also several nice plot twists. I will listen to it again most likely, but gah the narration makes me cringe every single time they say Megaladon. So I recommend it with that caution since it was like nails on a chalkboard to me long before the book was over.

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?
Sometimes.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?
Megaladon! Learn how to freaking pronounce it! Gah!!!

13 of 14 people found this review helpful

Wow Action Packed

This is another thrilling underwater adventure with monsters from a lost time entering into our time reaping havoc. We meet a new hero in Jack. Looking forward to more thrilling adventures. Sean again does a wonderful narration,

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Mega-loadin???

Producers and or narrator of this audio book need to do some research. It's a meg a la don. Not a mega loadin. So annoying. Also a buoy is boo e. Not boy.

14 of 17 people found this review helpful

Mispronunciation can KILL a good a good story!

I've listened to almost all of Greg Beick's books and have enjoyed them for the most part. Sean Mangan also does a great job...... but Fathomless has a MAJOR issue. When a word like Megalodon is used very frequent and mispronounced every time, it not only takes you out of the story, but also makes you cringe every time you hear it! (at least it did for me). In most cases, I would prefer to listen to a book, but with this one, would rather have read it - I'd certainly give it a higher rating if I did!

6 of 7 people found this review helpful

Great Listen

Mega-loadin or Megladon whichever you want to enunciate the word isn't a factor -- this book is great! Edge of my seat the whole time!!!

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

takes a long time to get started

just as I said takes along time to get started, after that it gets a bit better

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Annoyance, WTF moments, and Deja Vu.

What disappointed you about Fathomless?

*Spoilers ahead*

I am a fan of Greig Beck's Alex Hunter series; those books are an enjoyable way to escape reality and unwind for a few hours. I've never been particularly impressed by his portrayal of military technology, tactics, structure, operations, etc. but he writes science fiction and for the most part, it's a bit of good fun.

I had hopes for something similar and imaginative with Fathomless, but I was woefully disappointed. The lead protagonists, Cate and Jack were inconsistent and grating. She started her expedition to the Alaskan subterranean ocean with a lot of unnecessary risks that did not seem in form for an educated scientist. For example, when her drone first entered the caves that led to the underground sea, there was no need for her to run the drone past the point of no return. She and her comrades were not under pressure of time or space, and they could easily have made several flights, progressively mapping the cave better and moving deeper by bringing the drone back and recharging. Her decision to just push the drone in and see what they got was foolhardy and it was just too convenient that it happened to make it all the way to the water and also just happened to be eaten by a C. Megalodon just in time for a final transmission to be made over WiFi. (Over a distance of thousands of feet and under water? A WTF moment.)

Furthermore, when they actually make it into the cave and are attacked by a Dunkleosteus and Jack proposes that they turn back and get better prepared, she irrationally insists that they press forward. At this point her interactions with Jack have been mostly hormone driven and immature, and so her grating personality was established for me. But again, her decision-making is questionable at best. They are exploring an unknown ecosystem that has already provided them with a prehistoric placoderm predator and she insists that they've seen the worst that the sea has to offer them? (WTF moment) It's either hubris, or willful ignorance that drives her at this point and regardless, neither trait redeems her.

Jack is similarly one dimensional and irrational, first depicted as a womanizing ass then clearly set up to become to knight in shining armor by the climax. I could not take him seriously. He contemplates diving below the crippled boat to untangle the propeller and the Coastie asks him if he knows how to use tools under water; his response is to deflate and concede that the Coastie needs dive alone to do it. It ends up being a set of wire cutters and a blade he uses to cut the cable fouling the propeller. (WTF moment) You mean this heavily muscled, intelligent, man of action can't figure out how to use a set of wire cutters and a blade under water to turn a slow one-man-job into a faster two-man-job when time is critical? Get off the ship, man.

Conversely, the only two characters I actually enjoyed were Sonya and Valerie. (Please excuse my spelling if inaccurate, I listened to the audio book.) She was an intelligent and lethal bodyguard whose relationship with her employer was simple but believable and his characterization of a billionaire motivated by knowledge was also authentic and well executed. Their motivations made sense, whereas Cate and Jack seemed to flash back and forth between two extremes of a spectrum of contention and unified adoration.

My critiques extend to the author's depiction of time and space considerations. Within hours of discovering Valerie's hidden communication relays, the Russian enemy (I forget his name) has a stealth Blackhawk helicopter ferrying a former Spetsnaz assault team to the communication points on US soil in order to destroy them. This is implausible to say the least; I may have misinterpreted the time elapsed between events, but I got the impression that it was all happening very quickly. If this is true, that helicopter and the operatives would have had to have been pre-staged in Alaska to carry out the mission, also highly implausible. This same Russian antagonist uses a dirty thermo-nuclear weapon to seal the cave entrance and prevent rescue for his foe in the subterranean ocean. (WTF moment) There are a hundred other ways to accomplish the same goal in a manner that wouldn't bring every federal agency and the US military swarming all over the area you were hoping to clandestinely extract your hated enemy.

Also, when describing the final confrontation with the C. Megalodon, the sinking ship is described as being 50 miles from shore and 50 miles further again from the nearest coast guard base. The helicopter scrambled from this base is said to be 3 hours away, even if they hurry. A Coast Guard Jayhawk rescue chopper has a cruising speed of 165 knots, or about 190 mph. That means the helicopter could cover that distance in just over half an hour, so it can't be distance that is delaying the chopper. If the author is implying it takes that long to get a rescue helicopter ready, I find that difficult to believe. I don't know what Coast Guard SOPs are, but I imagine that each base has an alert aircraft and crew on some sort of ready tether, whether it's strip alert or 20 minute alert or something similar. A 20 minute alert would mean that a helo is fueled and ready to go with a crew standing by within 20 minutes of the bird, so that following notification, that helo is in the air within 20 minutes. Whatever the case, I'm confident the Coast Guard could get a rescue bird in the air long before the 2.5 hour mark.

If you wonder why I can't suspend my disbelief for something like this but I can for a prehistoric shark species surviving in a subterranean sea, it's actually quite simple. The author claims to use facts and science to bolster his writing and make the fiction more believable. A simple google search would have revealed that the time space considerations that precipitated the climactic battle were inaccurate and forced. I have come to expect more from this author and this is a large part of why I am so disappointed.

Finally, on several occasions, the book sounded like a less imaginative rehash of Meg by Steve Alten. From the way the scientists in the narrative interacted with people they needed to convince of the danger and how they actually went about dealing with the shark, this book screamed Meg. Just a much later, annoying, and poorly written Meg. Despite its own inaccuracies and issues, the Alten novel is the superior story.

As the performance went, the narrator did okay. He didn't bring anything special to the reading he often sounded like he overextended himself and was gasping at the end of sentences. His pronunciation of Carcharadon Megalodon was also infuriating. Google, dude, Google. They will tell you how to pronounce it.

In the end, this book was a waste of time. I nearly stopped listening numerous times but I held out hope that the author would redeem this book. He didn't; skip this one and read Greig Beck's other stuff. It's more entertaining and better executed than this.

19 of 26 people found this review helpful

Great story

Love all of Greig Beck's books, and wasn't disappointed with this one. Great storyline, engaging characters. However, although I enjoy Sean Mangan as narrator, his continual mispronounciation of Megalodon started driving me nuts - the story is about a giant MEGALODON, after all!! It's not a Mehg'-uh-loh'-dun. Over and over. And skeletal, and debris... Still well worth your credit and time though!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful