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I have been listening to the 2007 "full cast" version of Dune. I have not read the book in forever, and in the last 10 years have only really known Dune as the lovely David Lynch version and shittier-but-more-faithful Sci-Fi miniseries, so I had forgotten how good the actual text is. This full cast version is pretty good, and they drop the "he said" or "she said" for the full cast reading, which makes it sort of only 99% unabridged, but oh well! The main narrator is very good, and he reads all of the "italics of what people are thinking of RIGHT NOW" that Frank Herbert had a constant hard on for writing instead of the actors reading what they are thinking, so you get very used to his voice. On that note though, the only bizarre thing is that like one out of every six chapters the "full cast" thing is dropped and the main narrator just reads everything. It is a little bit weird, but the guy is good enough that he could have just read the whole thing and it would have still been good. It's just a bit jarring to get used to the actors voices only to have it drop back into the narrator doing all of them, and then the next chapter to go back to actors.
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May 24, 2010 20:31
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If you want a super cheap but nice portable audio player that does auto-resume for multiple audio books at once, check out the Sansa Clip+. Only like 40$ for the 4gb version, with an SD slot to pop in a cheap 16gb chip if you want. Mounts in Windows as a USB drive, just drag on audio books or w/e. Is super light, has a battery that lasts a long time, and is pretty much all around awesome for audio books.
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Aug 12, 2010 09:14
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Tricolor posted:I have it and it's amazing. It spazzes out determining chapters sometimes when I upload audiobooks. It doesn't like subfolders with track names like this: Folder 1 - Track 01.mp3, Folder 2 - Track 01.mp3. Instead of putting all of the folder 1 files first, it will mix the two. Thankfully a lot of audiobooks are not like this, and if they are I just have an id3 tagger rename all files to just be sequential.
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Aug 13, 2010 18:02
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If you've never read Dune then go for that, it is credited as one of the best sci-fi books ever for a reason. Only problem is for some weird reason (budgeting? hosed up cast schedule?) only like 2/3rds of the audioplay is an actual audioplay, with some chapters interspersed with just the narrator reading all roles. The villain has a big baritone for when it is an audioplay but the single narator type makes him have almost a scottish accent. So it is a little jarring. The single narator does all of the incidental/"talking in their own head" text (A LOT OF THAT in Dune) though, and Simon Vance is quite excellent so it is not too much of a problem. I just wish they had stuck with one or another. Also, it is 99% unabridged, as they edited out the 'he said' or 'she said' parts for the audioplay sections, since with the different voice actors you already know who said what.
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Sep 17, 2010 22:15
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Borh posted:I literally just finished listening to the new production of Dune, which is probably my favorite SF novel of all time, and it's pretty great. The main narrator is Simon Vance, who is one my favorites, but like someone else pointed out in this thread a while ago, this is a bit of a strange production, because some of the chapters have different actors playing the various characters, with Vance narrating, while others have him doing all the voices in traditional audiobook fashion. I have no idea why they did this (to cut costs, maybe?) but it works out fine once you get used to it. I can't tell you anything about the other book you mentioned, but if you're a fan of Dune or just great SF in general, you can't really go wrong with this one. Yeah, first book is like 4/5ths audioplay with some chapters being a straight unabridged audiobook. Simon Vance is very excellent-- he's the same guy who has done the Swedish Girl Who Played With Fire/etc books. He's like Mr. Top Star Audiobook guy now. Also, the guy who plays Paul is pretty awesome. But the first book is like 4/5ths audioplay, with the second book being like 1/3rd, and by the third it's just a full normal audiobook and not audio play.
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Sep 17, 2010 22:37
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Borh posted:Yeah, Vance did a great job with the Millennium Trilogy. I know absolutely nothing of the Swedish language, but I loved the way he pronounced all the proper nouns in the books.
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Sep 17, 2010 23:12
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Comrade Flynn posted:Driving to Vegas tomorrow, need something fun and easy to get into that's about 8 hours or so long. If you like hard sci-fi combined with military (think Horatio Hornblower in space) combined with an excellent imaging of first contact with a well-realized alien race, listen to the first eight hours of Niven and Purnell's The Mote In God's Eye. You'll most likely want to finish listening to the rest as it goes well over eight hours. If you want hard sci-fi that is probably about eight hours, listen to Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. If you don't like sci-fi then neither of those will help you!
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Apr 3, 2011 23:34
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Comrade Flynn posted:I've seen Mote recommended a few other times, so I'll grab that! Thanks! It is very military-scifi, but in a good way and not in a horrible way. It is definitely where a lot of other things stole from, such as the exact phrase of "Action stations, set condition one throughout the ship" ala re-imagined Battlestar, or the more military-esque feel that Star Trek went into for Star Trek 2 and beyond. My girlfriend just got done re-watching the excellent Horatio Hornblower A&E series, and it made me realize that Mote is very much Master & Commander/Horatio Hornblower MEETS ALIENS... IN SPAAAAACE.
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Apr 4, 2011 04:28
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Norns posted:I'm wondering if anyone has given the Ready Player One audio book a listen? Thinking about picking it up but don't want to waste my money if listing to Wil Wheaton read it would get old quickly. Wheaton is a surprisingly good narrator, and you quickly forget he is the one reading the book. I've listen to two of John Scalzi's books by him, however the narator/main character in either book was kind of a prick who thinks that he is pretty awesome, so maybe Wheaton's reading just kind of fit in.
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Nov 24, 2011 00:56
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HUMAN FISH posted:He's actually perfect for the book. I got the audiobook without knowing he was reading it and was pissed. But seeing as the protagonist is a smug oval office, Wil Wheaton suddenly turned out to be great for the job. Scalzi's Agent to the Stars and Fuzzy Nation both also have smug cunts as their main characters/narrators, so it I guess Wheaton has that market totally on lockdown now?
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Nov 25, 2011 23:50
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Snow Crash is pretty interesting to listen to, because a lot of the good corporation names your mind kind of just skips over when reading, but when said aloud they sound super awesome. However the chapters upon chapters of babylonian fake mythology get a bit old when read aloud. Small quibble.
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Dec 1, 2011 06:43
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dema posted:Dune audiobook is great. Got me most of the way through a cross country drive. It would be great if halfway through the book they didn't decide to randomly drop the audioplay aspect and have only one narrator read all parts, and then randomly go back to all-actors.
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Dec 5, 2011 04:49
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dema posted:Curious, I don't recall that at all. Perhaps I was delirious from driving for almost two days straight. Happens in about 4 chapters of the first book, half of the second, and by the third the main narrator just takes over full time. It is really jarring when the Baron is a deep low voice when done by an actor, but a Scottish accent when done by the narrator!
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Dec 5, 2011 08:31
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Windup Girl is pretty excellent for world building, even if the plot itself is a little eh. Probably one of the most believable (and thus depressing as poo poo) views of the future in ~100-150 years. The narrator is slow as poo poo in his reading though, the only way I could stand it is that my mp3 player can speed up tempo by like 15%.
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Apr 6, 2012 06:04
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GlassEye-Boy posted:The woman who does the reading for Diamond Age does a really good job. Great voice, and nice subtle accents that aren't jarring. She is honestly one of the best narrators I have ever heard for doing different voices in interesting ways that are both unique and memorable. Too bad that book sets up an awesome world only to be let down by a completely retarded plot that goes no where and abruptly ends with a slap right in your face from the author's dick when you could tell he got tired of writing it.
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Apr 8, 2012 07:04
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Wade Wilson posted:Just got an email from Audible where I get to pick a free book from a random selection of five books.
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Jul 27, 2012 02:53
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Wheaton is a great narrator but only for first person characters who tend to be insufferable snarky jerks. Which is what Scalzi almost always writes, so win-win. And yeah, Redshirts was fun but felt like only 2/3rds of a book with the ending happening far too quickly and everything going to plan perfectly. I felt like his publisher was like "You need to add more padding to the end or else people will feel like this is a novella and we couldn't sell it for as much" so he added the pointless codas. I felt the same way about Fuzzy Nation, as my copy of the audiobook had included the original Fuzzy Nation in the end without me knowing, so the book ended when the audiobook was only half over. Both were fun reads, but somehow I felt like there should have been a final act. TV-Analogy: Sort of like how most recent It's Always Sunny episodes feel compared to recent Curb Your Enthusiasms. Adult Swim shows get away with only writing one act worth of material before the end, Sunny does about 2 acts worth, but Curb always feels like a full three acts, so to speak.
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Aug 21, 2012 18:35
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I thought Roy Dotrice didn't do the fourth book due to health problems and when he came back to do the 5th book like 5 years later he had forgotten half of his voices or such.
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Aug 22, 2012 03:20
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Geektox posted:Yeah, I'm kinda regretting getting Game of Thrones as my first audiobook. Nothing against the narrator, he's great, but listening to so much dull banter has me swearing profusely at my MP3 player and looking generally insane to my family. Listen to a Scalzi book as your first audiobook, like Old Man's War. They're snappy and great, awesome little popcorn sci-fi.
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Aug 31, 2012 16:29
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Wheaton is a great narrator for stories told from the perspective of the main character being a great insufferable prick. Which are almost all of Scalzi's recent novels.
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Sep 3, 2012 16:52
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Dune Messiah is probably the shortest of the Dune novels, and least dense since you've already been introduced to all of characters. It basically follows the story of Maud-dib realizing he has unleashed a jihad on civilization and trying to figure out a way to stop it from getting worse via his future sight. Also involves political intrigue of factions trying to manipulate his messiah status. Children of Dune is a pretty slow-burn book, but pretty good as well, and involves his children. Books 4+ takes place like thousands of years later, and get pretty dense and a little incomprehensible unless you're really into it. And yeah, the weird cast thing with those recording sucked. By the second book it is mostly the single narrator taking over, and I believe by the third book it is completely him again.
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Sep 23, 2012 23:03
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Wind-Up Girl or anything else by Paulo Bacalagupi is great. Only problem with Wind Up Girl is that the narrator is INCREDIBLY slow, only way I could stand it was by putting my mp3 player on fast mode, which made him sound more British (a plus for a book set in Thailand). His other books are great, even his recent YA series. His short stories book (Pump Six) is out in audiobook form now too, and it is awesome.
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Feb 22, 2013 17:25
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The Human Division ends with nothing resolved. It's like part 1 of some unadvertised trilogy or some bullshit.
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Apr 27, 2013 03:57
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Wade Wilson posted:It's actually something like part 5 or 6 of an existing series (Old Man's War), but serialized instead of a standalone novel. I've read the previous 4 books. I even put up with the fourth book being an unadvertised young-adult re-telling of the drat third book by a teenage different point of view. But at least those books had loving conclusions to their main stories.
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May 1, 2013 05:11
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Dune is okay yet for some reason like 2-3 of the chapters they forgot to do the full-cast for or something and it is just the main narrator. The Baron goes from sounding like a black actor to a poor scottish impersonation.
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Oct 13, 2013 22:16
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Apoffys posted:Can anyone recommend me some good sci-fi audio books? Any sort of sci-fi would do really as long as it has a good narrator; I'm just getting a bit tired of reading about wizards. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl (needs 1.5x speed or such on narrator) Frank Herbet - Dune Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars John Scalzi - Old Man's War Fredrick Pohl - Gateway Joe Haldeman - The Forever War John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash Those should keep you busy, and if you like them check out more by the same authors. Most of those audio books have excellent readers, or at least excellent if you speed them up if they're too slow.
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Sep 28, 2014 19:42
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Another agreement that the movie was terrible. The casting was spot on and such-- it just didn't translate seeing how they could only do the first 30% of the book and then they rushed to the last 10%. Very disjointed and didn't work out, even if they picked perfect actors for the roles.
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Oct 2, 2014 16:11
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Wade Wilson posted:I forget, did they do the "uplifting music = horrible pain to demons" *plays Here I go again by Whitesnake* gag in the movie? I don't think so. They took so much out of the movie that wasn't in the first 25% of the book.
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Oct 3, 2014 17:59
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Rama is not a series. The first book was good and the rest are basically knock offs written by a ghost writer.
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Jan 17, 2015 19:10
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I highly recommend the Flashman novels to anyone who wants a bit of 19th century pre-Victorian British history combined with one of the best cowardly bastard anti-heroes ever. The reader of the books has one of the best 'landed gentry british snob' voices ever, and it totally works as an autobiographical memoir.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:05
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I wish I had more time to listen to audiobooks... I used to really enjoy zoning out and listening to them while doing pretty solo contract work (network wiring, etc). Now I work in a more customer service position and have to be pretty attentive and can't zone out as much. My wife has a perfect job for audiobooks though, being a researcher sorting archaeological fragments, and I am pretty jealous of that! Anyhow, I'd recommend Cormic McCarthey's The Road or Blood Meridian. The narration on both is excellent, even though you sometimes feel you miss out on being able to stop and re-read some of the nice prose in the audio format. But it is a good introduction to that excellent author, especially with how loving dark both novels are. Fun fact: Blood Meridian, with how loving dark and brutal it is, is apparently based completely on real events.
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Feb 15, 2015 19:12
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The Martian was a pretty good listen-- the narrator did an amazing job. However the story itself felt kind of... "written to be eventually sold as a movie"-esque? I don't know, a lot of recent sci-fi stories feel this way. I guess my biggest problem was reading Red Mars for the first time a few months back and thus the Martian felt a little light in comparison.
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Apr 20, 2015 20:24
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Can anyone recommend and good audio plays that are not too long. I'm going on a road trip with 3 others and we want to listen to some stuff but not like a full audiobook or something.
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May 30, 2016 20:09
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XBenedict posted:Save your Audible credits and go download a podcast audio play, like eos10, Wooden Overcoats, Limetown, or The Light of September. They're as good as any paid Audible plays, and considerably more concise. This is the sort of recommendation I was looking for. Thanks! Also thanks to the two comments above as well.
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May 30, 2016 22:15
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My physical books are mostly memories of times before I listened to digital copies. Cracking open my old tattered copy of Stars My Destination or my rare illustrated edition of Dune is very satisfying, even if I probably won't actually read the physical copy and more since I am so used to multitasking with audiobooks.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:09
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I have a 20 hour long mp3. I used to play stuff like this on my precious Sansa Clip but the dang thing broke and long ago went out of production. Been trying to find an app on iOS that is good for long files like this-- VLC definitely chokes on it. gently caress using itunes. I just want something with a simple drag and drop web client like VLC does. I wish Overcast would let me add 3rd party files because drat that one is the best for podcasts.
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Feb 1, 2018 23:44
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Mister Facetious posted:Anyone know of any decent "mad scientist/science" fiction? Preferably not isekai/MMO/VR/etc. gaming bullshit YA trash that seems to have taken over Audible's algorithms lately for science-fantasy. Paolo Bacigalupi's Wind Up Girl and such is about bioengineering and gene splicing gone wrong, set like 1-2 hundred years or so into the future when no one can imagine why the gently caress baby boomers and such didn't realize they had it so good. His stuff should be labeled "realistic and plausible view of the future to the point of depressing" instead of sci-fi though.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:02
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ClassH posted:I know I am probably late but here is what I use. This will play a single large MP3 no problem, or put tons of little MP3's together into 1 book also. It shows cover art and you can load books through web interface easy. I since gave Overcast 10$ to try out their uploading feature to see if it would work for audiobooks, as that app has perfect features such as auto-speed and such. Turns out it just turns out its own Dropbox feature where you can upload up to 2Gbps to their server which then streams down to you. Definitely not what I was looking for.
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May 15, 2018 17:54
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Books get better and better by each one, until 4th. Then it kind of backslides but only for that 4th. Then 5th through 7th get as interesting as the third one was again. It doesn't help that the 4th has a worse narrator than the others. Thankfully the original returns for the rest.
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Nov 11, 2018 00:48
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Bronson Pinchot did an excellent job on The 13 and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers. Dude is a LEGIT audiobook narrator.
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Mar 4, 2019 22:21
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