Battlestar Galactica: The Cylons' Secret [Abridged] [Audible Audio Edition]

by Craig Shaw Gardner (Author), Jonathan Davis (Narrator)

Editorial Reviews

It's been 20 years since the end of the Cylon war. The 12 human colony worlds are rebuilding and the Cylons...the Cylons have been just too quiet. They are nowhere to be found. The robotic race that tried to obliterate their creators has gone to parts unknown in deep space.

The aftermath of the war has created a new, illegal profession: scavenger. Tom Zarek is one, scouring the outer settlements for valuable Cylon technologies and artifacts and usually returning empty-handed. But now he and the crew of the Cruiser Lightning have found the Omega Station, a scientific station shrouded in secrecy beyond the edge of charted space. This is it, the big score, except something is wrong...the base is still occupied, not by humans, but by Cylons!

The Battlestar Galactica, one of the oldest warships in the fleet, receives the Lightning's distress call, a cryptic one-word message: "Cylons". William Adama, newly promoted to second-in-command, is worried. Most of his crew are green, new recruits not prepared for anything but the most routine missions. And, as Adama soon discovers, this mission is anything but routine. Omega is, indeed, full of Cylons but also something much more disturbing.

Product Details

• Audible Audio Edition
• Listening Length: 5 hours and 56 minutes
• Program Type: Audiobook
• Version: Abridged
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Audible.com Release Date: August 21, 2006
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000I0HDMA
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Cynical fraudulent tie-in hack job, September 20, 2006

By 

L. Masco (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Cylons' Secret: Battlestar Galactica 2 (Paperback)

This book is nothing more than a hack job, intended to cash in on the Battlestar Galactica name. The author has no regard for Battlestar Galactica continuity, and violates it left and right.

He attempts to work events into the backstories of Adama, Tigh, Zarek, and the Colonies that simply don't fit - we're supposed to believe that news of the Cylons lurking about in a Dreadnaught ("close to ten times the size of Galactica") wouldn't leak from the crews of 6 battlestars to the rest of the populace, right after we're told that the Admiral couldn't keep the CIC personnel on the Galactica from blabbing to the rest of the crew. Yet, we're told in the TV series that nobody has seen the Cylons since the armistice - that's a critical backstory element.

Cylon Wariors from the period of the war look like the 1978 series' Centurions, not like the more modern versions that Shaw describes.

The Colonial High Command would not have been as lackadaisical about computer control of the Colonial military, had they known that a Cylon Dreadnaught was still out there at the edges of human space - even 20 years after the fact. Especially when they had been concerned enough to send 6 battlestars after it.

I can only guess that this was a manuscipt that the author had sitting around, in which he replaced his own characters with the BSG characters - labelling this as Battlestar Galactica is a fraud. I haven't been this angry about a book in a long, long time - unless you're short of material to burn in a fireplace, avoid this one... you won't know how bad a sucker job you missed. And if you see Craig Shaw Gardner, tell him I want my three hours back.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Misleading at Best, October 7, 2006

By 

Mr. Robert C. Elsenpeter "henry_the_dog" (Blaine, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cylons' Secret: Battlestar Galactica 2 (Paperback)

Before I get too far, I'd just like to say I only got to page 77 of this book. If it picked up and got better by page 78, then I missed it. Unfortunately, the frst quarter of this book was a snoozer.

If I had picked up a phone book I'd have a better chance of finding people I knew that reading this thing. Set 20 years in the past (ugh) the author tries to make a lot of his own square pegs fit into the BSG round holes . Too bad they just don't fit.

This book seemed more like a rewrite of a 1960s Star Trek episode, trying to be shoehorned into BSG -- 20 years in the past.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Blegh!! Written for 12-year olds, October 29, 2006

By 

Harvey Moul "I read more than you do, most li... (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cylons' Secret: Battlestar Galactica 2 (Paperback)

Utter crap. Reads like the outline to a bad fan-fiction movie, complete with a girl-crush from the plucky young heroine on a young Tom Zarek.

For anyone that seriously enjoys the show, you need to skip this "book" and pretend it doesn't exist. Reading it will be painful and annoying - thankfully it is a very quick read so the torture doesn't drag on too long.

On a more serious note, it is written for preteens with a crude, simplistic plot and nearly non-existent character development. There are gaping plot holes and serious deviations from established canon that are distracting. While it claims to "based upon" the re-imagined series, the word "loosely" should be included in that statement.