Contains spoilers.
I didn’t want to finish listening to Daniel X: Genesis by James Patterson and Aaron Tracy. I wanted to savor every last drop that I could.
It’s been about 10 years since I’ve seen anything Daniel X. I wanted to savor this audiobook. It’d probably be the last Daniel X story, unless they finally make a movie or a TV series.
The audiobook is actually an audio drama with a full cast and soundtrack—including a song “written” by the band Daniel joins.
The story is broken into four episodes, which gives it a nice radio series feel, and allows you to enjoy the story slower. It was great!
It felt like the old Daniel X books. Same humor. Same action. Same pacing. Same quips from Daniel.
The audio drama is advertised as a prequel, yet it doesn’t match up with the original books.
In the books, Daniel is 15. In the audio drama, he is 16. How’d he lose a year?
In the books, Daniel lost his parents at age three. In the audio drama, they died a couple of years before the story.
In the books, Daniel always had his powers. In the audio drama, he gets his powers on his sixteenth birthday.
In both, he has friends created through his power (“imagery friends”). However, in the books, he has (I believe) four. In the audio drama, it’s one, and she has a completely different name.
With all these differences, I figured something like the story’s villain had Daniel in some simulation or under a spell. It wouldn’t be the first time one of the aliens he was hunting did this.
It didn’t happen.
My other theory was this story was an alternate timeline or a semi-reboot. In the last Daniel X book, his friends are resurrected. It kinda hinted at some time shift thingy. It hinted at a possible shift in realities. I figured with Daniel being older in the “prequel,” he was going down this new timeline. I kept waiting for his reincarnated friends to show up. They didn’t.
They acted like this was meant to be a prequel to the original books.
However, I can give Patterson and Tracy a pass on the story because the last Daniel X book was 2015 and Genesis came out in 2022. That’s quite a gap. It makes sense that not everything lined up. I can hardly remember something I wrote two weeks ago little alone 7 years.
I also wonder if Genesis was an unpublished “pilot” book. That this story was meant to be how the books went; but for whatever reason, it was changed.
That being said, the audio drama was really great. It felt like a Daniel X story. Still wishing they could make a TV show or movie.
The music did get a little loud, even surpassing the spoken words. And there were times when you didn’t know what was happening; it’s an audio drama (like a radio show) not an audiobook, so some scenes had no description. I did like the sound cue for when Daniel created something.
So, Genesis is a great addition to the Daniel X story, as long as you don’t get too wrapped up in the “prequel-ness” of it. You have to look at it as a reboot or an alternate universe.
The thing that really spooked me about the whole situation was that no one seemed to notice the discrepancies between the books and the audio drama. I looked through a good chunk of the reviews and didn’t find one person mentioning the inconsistency.
I felt like I was in an alternate timeline.
I might just have to read the Daniel X books again to make sure I’m not in some parallel world or that one of the Outlaw Aliens hasn’t changed reality.
I can live with reading them again. Maybe I’ll start with the manga or the graphic novel or maybe play the game. Man, I really wish they’d make a movie (TV show would be better—where are you Netflix?)
5/5
Joe Rover 
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