Cosmic Delivery Boy

Read Time: 3 Minutes

I went into this thinking it would be a slam dunk. I’d enjoyed books by LG Estrella previously, and a humorous sci-fi sounded like a done deal, but multiple times throughout, I was tempted to give up and press the return button. I hate doing that, though, so I didn’t, and I managed to push through to the end.

The beginning of this book just felt like a huge info dump and trying too hard to be humorous. The most powerful beings in existence, for example, are cosmic guinea pigs with cute names like Cuddles. The whole idea just seemed forced.

Anyway, these guinea pigs run a 10-billion-mile-wide warehouse, something like Amazon but on a multi-verse spanning scale. And for some reason, they need to employ our hapless hero, Simon. Yes, they need this mook from Earth to deliver to places like literal Hell planets and other such places.

Simon agrees to be the delivery boy because he’ll earn 100k a year, and they’ll save his mother. So we’re this Galaxy-spanning thing, and we’ll send you to almost certain doom each time, and we’ll just send you to hell for your training mission, but yeah, all this makes sense. Simon just agrees to everything and somehow copes with everything not making any sense.

He gets partnered with a watch, an AI advisor who can basically do everything for him, such as piloting the indestructible suit he has to keep him safe and operate all the weapons. Tell me again why this guy is necessary? In fact, it’s because of all of this that he’s never in any real danger during any of it, just deus ex machina away any actual problems.

The whole advisor/watch stuff is just annoying and abrasive. It seems they were trying for snarky but missed the mark. Trying for a Bender (Futurama) style attitude because the characters were heavily influenced by Futurama, as it features a former pizza delivery boy turned galactic delivery boy, an old guy boss, the robotic watch that refers to him as “meatbag” (oh, hello Bender), horrible looking squid monster (aka Zoidberg), but with much less humour.

Once the package delivery part of the story commenced, it became slightly more interesting. Setting aside the plot armour, the Hell environment and demons were interesting and the war that was going on.

Then Simon goes on his second delivery that, for the most part, was just the same idea as the first but rehashed with elves in a fantasy forest setting instead.

The narration by Matt Cowlrick was really good, even if I didn’t care much for the story. Various accents were believable, with a broad range of tones and inflections that worked well. The production quality was good, too, with no noticeable issues, background noises or retakes.

So this was book one of the series and, at the time of writing, the only one currently available. This is where I exit the series, as it just didn’t work for me at all.