Which one is the best Trek audiobook?
- Thread starter Yevetha
- Start date
There might not be a best and most are the worst.
I say this because most Star Trek audiobooks are abridged. That makes them fit the worse category.
Legends of the Ferengi is hilarious, perhaps even funnier than the book. Rene Auberjonois is probably my favorite narrator.
I've only heard one -- based on Greg Cox' The Rise of Khan Noonien Singh -- and loved it. It wasn't just a reading, it sounded almost like an audio drama..they had sound effects like the doors swishing and the computers beeping, that sort of thing. I think the cassette tapes are..somewhere in my bedroom. I used to have a big box of cassette tapes that I wasn't sure what to do with when CDs overtook them, stashed in my closet.
Q In Law, read by John Delancie and Majel Barret is a fun listen, even if it is abridged.
No question--
PRIME DIRECTIVE
It was so epic, could of been a great film!
Near destruction of 1701
Cats named after admirals
an evil planet
Lt. Styles (from ST III)
and
Kirk with a beard
What more could you want!!
Oh ya, also this Prime Directive plot stuck in there.
The
S H A T I N A T O R
PRIME DIRECTIVE
It was so epic, could of been a great film!
Near destruction of 1701
Cats named after admirals
an evil planet
Lt. Styles (from ST III)
and
Kirk with a beard
What more could you want!!
Oh ya, also this Prime Directive plot stuck in there.
The
S H A T I N A T O R
No it doesn't. The earliest ones - those read by either James Doohan or George Takei, "with Leonard Nimoy as the voice of Spock" - are not what I'd call "abridged audios". Rather they are reinterpretations of the original novels, by the original authors. The stories are reworked in order to isolate some sections of the books so they become Spock's log entries. Together with original, new soundtrack music, these are definitely not typical abridged audio novels. They never attempted to be anything but exciting new adaptations of ST stories.
Later audios, usually "abridged by George Truett", are longer in duration, but perhaps closer to a regular abridgement.
My favourites are:
* "Strangers from the Sky", in which a huge novel is cleverly reduced to an exciting, entertaining 90 min. story - Takei's rendition of southern-accented Melody Sawyer is amazing. IIRC, Takei was nominated for an audio award for reading this production.
* "Final Frontier", with James Doohan recreating his rendition of Robert April (from TAS), and even doing the famous mission monologue in April's voice. A taste of an ongoing mission we barely got to see.
* "New Frontier: Stone and Anvil", a bittersweet novel featuring Ensign Janos' last adventure with Starfleet; I'd fallen behind on my reading and actually heard the audio first, then made myself catch up with the whole hardcover novel because I'd loved the audio so much. (I think I did the same with "Sarek", which is also great.)
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I think my favourite Trek audio book has to be "Imazdi" read by Jonathan Frakes. He does a pretty awesome Picard impression and his Troi voice is hilarious. The ShatnerVerse audio books are favourites of mine as well.
Spock's World
Yep. My US penpal was with me when I picked up "Reunion", read by Gates McFadden, in a US store in December 1991 (along with Patrick Stewart's "A Christmas Carol" audio). An avid Gates/Bev fan, my penpal begged to listen to to it before I left on my next part of my journey. I'd already read the novel on the plane, but she heard it cold, and hung on every word, and some rather funny/impressive impersonations by Gates.
Yep, pretty solid.
Can I also say that unabridged novels really are a very different animal. I think of them more as tasters for, or reminders of, the original printed text. Especially the ones read by Star Trek identities; new performances by old favourite stars. I've felt no desire to seek out the unabridged "Vulcan's Soul" trilogy; I've already read the books.
Neither have I been able to find the time to listen to Zachary Quinto's audio version of the ST 2009 movie. While I could once easily find 90 or 180 minutes to listen to an early S&S audio, I can never find 8.5 hours to listen to, or start to listen to, Zachary.
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The latest Star Trek book I can find made into an audiobook is Star Trek: Movie Tie-In.
Loved Stone and Anvil. The way they added sound effects and the actor did alien voices was brilliant. I didn't like how Calhoun had . . . long . . . pauses . . . between . . . words, . . . though.
The complete list is here:
http://therinofandor.blogspot.com.au/2007/05/i-hear-star-trek.html
... and yes, ST 2009 was Simon & Schuster's most recent audio, and their first unabridged ST title adaptation.
Yeah, Joe Morton does a rather bizarre voice characterization for Calhoun in "New Frontier, Books 1-4", 270 min. "Excalibur: Restoration", 180 min and "Stone and Anvil", 240 min.
For a different take on Calhoun, try "Gateways: What Lay Beyond" by Diane Carey, Peter David, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Christie Golden, Robert Greenberger and Susan Wright, which is read by David Kaye, 240 min.
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Yevetha
Commodore
Are we ever going to see some more or out of the question?
I would predict the next JJ movie will get the unabridged audio treatment, but S&S Audioworks were supposedly disappointed by sales of the regular novel adaptations.
So far, Recorded Books hasn't gone beyond its three "Vulcan's Soul" unabridged titles.
The Shatner "Captain's Glory" was the last one, delayed a year like the book due to the Reeves-Stevens work on ENT, but the regular productions had essentially ceased a year earlier. Had sales remained okay, they'd have probably started doing the trade paperbacks that replaced hardcovers, but S&S Audio had already got cold feet with "DS9: Unity", the first hardcover not to get an audio, IIRC, and only doing one volume each of "DS9: Millennium" and "Vulcan's Soul". ("DS9: Warped" hadn't helped DS9's cause, either.)
I'd disagree with that. Trek books are pretty notorious for padded chapters and/or being written to outline. That's certainly not limited to Trek books, but this book line doesn't usually get mentioned as the most tightly edited (a problem more true of the period that saw multiple books every month).
Also, several of the audio adaptations (Kahless, Spock's World) jettisoned the "prior history" half of the book, so the present-day half that was left wasn't trimmed that much for audio.
I do think the one-tape adaptations were too short to do anything but summarize events. That didn't leave enough running time to preserve sufficient dialogue to resemble a complete conversation. If the single-tape adaptation had been turned completely into a First Officers Log, I suspect that would have worked better.
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Hmm. I wonder if David Kaye's Picard voice there is the same as his Professor Xavier voice in X-Men Evolution, which was pretty much a Patrick Stewart impression. Then again, Stewart himself played Picard and Xavier rather differently, with Professor X being a much more gentle, soft-spoken figure. So did Kaye amend his Stewart impression accordingly?
