What, you won’t spring for the nice copies?
https://subterraneanpress.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=hyperion
https://subterraneanpress.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=endymion
Lol, no, she can have my well-loved 1990 first edition mass market paperback. I have had that book for 32 years now.
ETA: And who is the blonde in Fall of Hyperion?
This book has been on my want-to-read list for a while. I think part of the reason I haven’t gotten around to it yet is that I haven’t figured out whether it’s best experienced in print or in the audio version.
I always assumed it was Anea, even though she didn’t show up in that book.
Also, that’s the same edition I had. Though in my last couple of re-reads I’ve gone with an e-book.
IMNSHO nothing is best experienced in the audio version.
One of the pleasures of Hyperion is trying to figure out which sf author is being imitated in each story, which I think would be far, far more difficult to do in an audio version.
False!
She was the…
Wait.
Spoiler alert.
Anyway… you know! She is technically in the book.
The best kind of correct!
Sidebar here, and I generally agree with you, but I can think of one exception, Mel Brooks World War Z. Admittedly the movie was a hot steaming mess that had little to do with the book, but the audiobook was very well done, with the (mostly) unabridged version having a voice case of over 30 (+) people, including such talents as Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, and Bruce Boxlietner to name a few. Since the book was ‘based’ on collected first person interviews that were narrated tot he author, it is a perfect fit of form and function for the audiobook.
But yes, in general, audiobooks don’t live up to the source, this is one of the exceptions that prove the rule.
IMHO some are and some aren’t, but your mileage may definitely vary, depending on your preferences and how you best process things.
Since @Mama_Zappa mentioned Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, I will offer that his narration of Agent To the Stars worked significantly better for me than when I tried to read it for myself (and in general I’ve been happy with Scalzi in audio).
That would be interesting…
(Max Brooks wrote World War Z. Mel Brooks typically wrote in a very different genre…).
But Max is Mel’s son.
The Stephen Fry Harry Potter audiobooks are superior to the books and the movies.
Also, any Neil Gaiman read by Neil Gaiman.
Mea culpa, was responding just as I was heading out the door to work and had a brain fart, I also missed the “tot he”.
Rather than hijack this thread, I’ve created a separate thread:
Interesting on your take with Agent to the Stars. I was so badly burned by Redshirts that I avoid AttS specifically because of Wheaton’s narration - and the reviews of that one concur with my opinion. He made zero effort to distinguish voices between characters, even of different genders - and it was not helped by the fact that several characters had VERY similar names (Dahl, Duvall). Now, when he needed to portray emotion, he nailed it… but it was very tough to keep track of who was saying what.
Re audio better than reading: A full-cast recording, done well, can be a real treat - not just an “audio play”, but with WWZ mentioned above, it was stunningly appropriate given the premise of the book (someone interviewing survivors of the zombie war; each chapter was told by the person who had the experience). And one advantage, to me, is that you can’t decide to skip to the last chapter and find out what happened - you’re in for the full journey. Usually that’s a good thing (though not always).
That’s hardly a deal-breaker for me. After all, in the printed book, the dialogue of different characters is all printed in the same font. And that particular book is written in the first person: it makes sense for all the characters to have the same voice because the POV character is telling us what they said.
(re Wheaton’s narration of Redshirts): It’s told in the third person. You’ll have stuff like
“Blahblahblah” said Duvall. “This that and the other and something’s fishy” said Dahl. “Four score and seven years ago, some hack writer came up with a screwy storyline, and ever since then blah blah yackety yack and I’ve been hiding in the service passageways and now I’ll recite pi to 3000 digits…48127” said Jenkins.
With print, you can glance up or down to see who is speaking. With Wheaton’s narration, you can’t tell who’s speaking - e.g. by the time you get to “Jenkins said”, you’ve been listening to several sentences without knowing who is talking.
Even a slight tweak to the voices would make it easier to distinguish.
Anyway - back to the original topic, and the Vorkosigan series: TV Tropes has a lot of fun stuff on the topic.
Those two, definitely.
The Warrior’s Apprentice, wherein he creates Admiral Naismith and the Dendarii Mercenaries.