Clara’s Verdict
This audiobook runs nineteen hours and forty-five minutes. The publisher’s description for it runs to about sixty words. That imbalance is not an oversight. Valkyrie is the ninth book of Expeditionary Force, it is written for people who have already read the eight books in front of it, and Craig Alanson’s publisher clearly judged that those people need nothing beyond a premise and a promise.
The premise: the Merry Band of Pirates have accepted the inevitable, which is that Earth is doomed, and the most they can do is move a few thousand people out of reach before the aliens arrive to finish the planet off. The promise arrives as a one-word correction in the copy. There is one other thing they can do, which is to hit the enemy so hard that the aliens regret ever hearing of humans. My verdict is that the audiobook delivers exactly that, and that its ending is the thing every review here ends up talking about.
About the Audiobook
The audio came from Podium Audio on 4 February 2020, running nineteen hours and forty-five minutes, a substantial listen even by the standards of long-running military science fiction. It carries a 4.6 average from 5,157 ratings.
The reading order question does not need much discussion. This is book nine. The description assumes you know who the Merry Band of Pirates are, why Earth is doomed and what has already been attempted, and it makes no effort whatsoever to catch anyone up. Beginning here would be like joining a long-running television drama at the ninth season finale. You would follow the action and feel none of the weight.
One thing is worth flagging before you press play. According to a reviewer here, the author billed this instalment as a book of revelations concerning a character called Skippy, and that same reviewer reports the revelations are compressed into roughly the final ten pages, fired off in quick succession with little expansion. If you are coming to book nine specifically for answers, adjust your expectations about where in those nineteen hours they turn up. Everything before that is the operation itself: the plan to move a few thousand people out, and the decision to hit back on the way.
The Narration
R.C. Bray reads, and the first thing to say about a job of this size is that stamina is a genuine criterion. Nearly twenty hours of continuous narration with a large recurring cast is an endurance test as much as an interpretive one, and consistency of characterisation between hour two and hour nineteen is the quality that separates competent series work from the sort that quietly wears a listener down.
The specific demand of this material is the comic register sitting inside a military plot. The reviews are clear that character interaction is at least half of why people are here, and one of them singles out a character called Skippy whose promised revelations were the advertised draw of this instalment. That kind of writing is timing-dependent in a way that straight action prose is not. A reader has to move from operational tension to comedy inside a single exchange without the seams showing. Bray’s default is dry and faintly sardonic, which is the correct baseline: it allows the jokes to arrive without being announced, and it keeps the serious material from tipping into melodrama.
Ensemble separation is the other test, and a series this deep has accumulated a great many recurring voices. What I would listen for in a sample is not whether the characters sound different, because they will, but whether the differences are built on manner rather than on accent, since accent-based differentiation is what begins to grate at hour fifteen. None of the reviews on this listing discusses the performance at all. They are responding to Alanson’s plotting rather than to Bray’s reading, which is worth knowing before you treat the average as a verdict on the audio.
What Readers Say
Each of the three arrives at the ending, and no two of them arrive at the same conclusion about it. Jarrak, writing in December 2019, opens with two exclamations of pure disbelief and then explains himself:
Many a time a TV show has left you with a season finale cliffhanger that has you cursing the writers and producers but it’s rare in a novel but Craig has managed to do so with Valkyrie.
Five stars are awarded regardless, along with a declaration of intense interest in how the characters get out of this, and then the review is cut off. PJL, at four stars, calls it entertaining science fiction and begins a sentence about the final chapter that the listing cuts short before it is finished. R Price, at five stars, supplies the most useful buyer’s warning of the three, which is the point about the revelations I have already described, alongside a clear statement of following the series for the plot and the character interaction in equal measure.
Two things follow. First, all three reviews converge on the closing stretch, which means the shape of the ending is a genuine feature of the reading experience rather than a minority irritation, and you should decide in advance how you feel about that. Second, two of these three reviews predate the audiobook’s February 2020 release, so as with most long-running series, part of the rating pool belongs to the novel rather than to the recording.
Who Should Listen?
Do not begin here. That is the only firm instruction this review contains, and it holds without exception: go to book one of Expeditionary Force and work forward, because the entire value of this instalment is accumulated rather than intrinsic.
If you are already eight books deep, the calculation is different and much simpler. This is a long, well-produced entry with a strong central operation and a closing move its readers are still arguing about, and Bray gives it a register that suits the material exactly. Go in aware of two things. The revelations that were advertised arrive late and briskly. And the ending is engineered to leave you wanting more, which every reviewer here confirms it does. If being left standing on an edge is not something you enjoy, that is worth knowing before you commit.
