anyone give me an opinion of the Audiobook ?
I'm re-visiting the book in audiobook format, after having read it with my own eyes a month or so ago. I'm going through it at a relaxed pace, and so far I'm really enjoying it at a more leisurely speed. I like the narrator, his performance sounds right at home with the performance style of Star Trek actors generally. I can't get more specific, that's just a general impression. He does a really good impression of Captain Kirk, but it might be annoying to fans who feel the periodic pauses in his dialogue is over exaggerated in the public perception of Shatner's acting. I personally have found it to sound like a man who is thinking through parts of what he's saying next while he's already speaking. Anyway, the narrator gives a good rendering of Kirk, as well as McCoy and Sulu.
A major positive point is that he is pronouncing the Sacagawea the way Chrisopher Bennett has established in the book (Sa KAH ga wea, more emphasis on the second syllable, hard G). What's interesting is I've already seen a couple youtube videos and review podcasts that pronounce it the way Bones did when talking with Kirk early in the book, which has made my eyes pop out. I had difficulty with it, and spent a few moments early on in the book trying to get right, so that I would read it right every time it came up. Sometimes I pronounced it out loud when I came to the name in the book. I think it was only towards the last half or third of the book that it became more or less second nature. The narrator for the audiobook does it second nature with any telling pause.
Edited to add: A major point when any audiobook is the narrator, and that can sometimes be a huge deal breaker. And this may sound prejudiced, but even as someone in the US, I sometimes find it very easy to get annoyed by narrators with an American English accent. I'm spoiled on a lot of British narrators, and almost never come across one that I dislike. Before I bought the audiobook for TCO, I listened to the narration sample on Amazon. The fact that the narrator, Robert Petkoff, immediately did not annoy me was huge. I heard enough of his rendering of Captain Kirk's dialogue to sell me on the audio. I hope they keep him for Star Trek books for a good long while, I think he's a good fit for them.
The prose flows well, and is so far very easy to listen to in audio format.
Finished the audiobook version last night. It might be because I listen to books on my short commute (less than 30 minutes each way) but I had a hard time tracking the intercuts between the various stories. YMMV, but this isn’t an ideal book to listen to. I suspect it would flow better on the page/e-reader.
It works okay for the weird way I do audiobooks, which is usually to re-visit a book in a more "lazy" way. When I say that, I don't mean people who listen to audiobooks are being lazy. I just mean that I personally will re-experience a book in a more lazy way, because I know the flow of the story, and I know what unusual words and names look like spelled on the page. I know what Khorasani's name looks like, and I've heard the word's she's spoken without accent in my head; so when the narrator speaks them with accent, the accent doesn't throw me off.
You're talking about the time-jumps between events on the Sacagawea, and I agree that it might be difficult on audio. With the book, I was able to physically flip back and forth between sections. So a moment where the story jumps from Enterprise to Vega Colony, to Sacagawea I can definitely see as being disorientating. While physically reading with my eyes, I did pause and flip back and forth, and took a few moments to anchor myself and figure out that Chrisopher Bennett broadcasts were the story is going to jump to in the next very heavily in the closing paragraphs of a given section early on. I can see the numbers on the page, and if I want, jot down a timeline for a visual. With the audiobook, I tend not to do this kind of things. Numbers, and years kind of don't register as strongly.
The audio works okay after having read it physically, and doing a little extra work anchoring the overall novel's trajectory. It flows easily as a listen. But I will tell you, every once in a while I do listen to an audiobook as a first time experience of a book, and that really is a bit more disorientating; I will listen to it differently than when I'm listening to a book I am re-experiencing.
And thank you for the behind-the-scenes perspective, as well. Hope the book does well.
