Ancestral Night cover art

Ancestral Night

A White Space Novel

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Ancestral Night

By: Elizabeth Bear
Narrated by: Nneka Okoye
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About this listen

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants.
She thinks she knows who she is.
She is wrong.

A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of a powerful ancient technology, just as Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way and find themselves both on the run, and in possession of ancient, universe-changing technology.
When the authorities prove corrupt, it becomes clear that Haimey is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilisation from its potential power - and from the revolutionaries who want to use it to seed terror and war. But doing so will take her from the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's core to the infinite, empty spaces at its edge. Along the way, she'll have to uncover the secrets of ancient intelligences lost to time as well as her own lost secrets, which she will wish had remained hidden from her forever . . .

Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.

Praise for Elizabeth Bear

'Gripping, perfectly balanced, and highly recommended' Kirkus

'Like the best of speculative fiction, Bear has created a fascinating and complete universe
that blends high-tech gadgetry with Old World adventure and political collusion' Publishers Weekly©2019 Elizabeth Bear (P)2019 Orion Publishing Group
Cyberpunk Dystopian Military Science Fiction Fiction Thought-Provoking Black Hole

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All stars
Most relevant
This book at no stage raised my heart beat above a gentle stroll. Well written, it just never got into the realm of I can't put this down. Like I said, slow and steady.

Slow and steady.

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Really enjoyed this. I was invested in the characters. It had a good story arc and lots of interesting novel sci if ideas.
If you like Alastair Reynolds I would recommend a listen.

Good sci fi, great vision and story telling.

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Really nice story in general,
Well developed characters and pleasantly narrated would like to see more on this line

GREAT LISTEN

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Right from the go I was engrossed. I found the characters where all relatable and the story took some unexpected turns that kept me on my toes!

Interesting world

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I was expecting an exploration of the classic Big Dumb Object trope that I like. However the mystery of the found ship is soon dispelled and even the mystery of the aliens behind the second ship is quickly explained. So it’s more of redemption journey for the main protagonist, dealing with a traumatic past. Still Haimey and the shipboard AI are compelling characters, although some parts of the book made me want to
Shout out “just shoot the pirate FFS”, looking forward to future stories set in the same universe.

Narration was good.

Not what I was expecting

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