this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.
Man I wish I could enjoy Wheaton's narration style but after trying to listen to John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire and hearing every single character given the same tone deaf voice (literally tone deaf: not like saying racist things but rather had the same sarcastic and smug tone of voice for everyone irrespective of character descriptions or even explicit tones given like "she said morosely") I refuse to buy another book he has narrated.
Amber Benson it is then.
On the topic of Will Wheaton narrating audiobooks, do I understand correctly that the version of The Martian narrated by R.C. Bray is no longer available to purchase on Audible and is now replaced by one done by Wheaton?
I activately look for books narrated by R. C. Bray. I love his style. And he nailed the downeast Maine accent in Expeditionary Force.
R. C. Bray has a great voice. He should narrate audio books.
Wild that they'd replace an excellent voice actor with a incredibly mediocre one.
But Wil is famous so ...
The real weird thing is the cover art provided with the R. C. Bray version published by Podium Publishing is the movie poster with Matt Damon's face on it, the current version narrated by Wheaton uses the original book cover of space suit b/w orange.
Makes me wonder if Wil Wheaton low-key didn't want to be narrating the book at all, and maybe his sarcastic smug tone was a reflection of how he felt about the whole damn job. Maybe he felt he wasn't getting paid enough etc
It seems that AI audiobooks are not for you.
Definitely not. But what does that have anything to do with Wil's awful narration?
Their narration can be fairly bland from what I've heard.
I don't like audiobooks, so that's second hand.
Would that be Early Riser by Jasper Fforde? If not, I'm very curious what the book was.
It’s Lock-In by John Scalzi. After a ~weird flu~, a large portion of the population are left paraplegic and can only interact with the world by remotely controlling humanoid robots. It’s still fairly early on in the tech, so most folks are walking around in generic of the shelf units that are only a few generations removed from the Boston Dynamics or Atlas robots.
It was a really weird novel to be reading during the first week of Covid shutdowns.
Huh, thank you for the summary! What a strange (but fascinating) premise. Definitely a weird book to have during the first week of COVID shutdowns... All the zombie apocalypse stories also hit rather differently when read during COVID lockdown 😅
It’s probably worth mentioning that the book’s a police procedural / crime novel. 👍 It takes place about 25 years after the fictional pandemic. The story starts off with a robot-piloting protagonist’s first day on the job as part of the FBI’s robot-crimes division. It almost won a Hugo and is worth taking a look at if the premise sounds interesting.
What books are those? Sounded like murdebot diaries until the end.
Search for "wil wheaton amber benson audiobook verge" and their story on the book and its sequel should be the first thing that pops up.
Oh, the sequel to Lock In, by Scalzi. I haven't read Lock In yet, but I know about it. It would probably have been a Hugo nominee except a whole bunch of right wing types banded together to vote for books that were less inclusivity-minded. They were successful, and Scalzi was one who lost out. Here's an article from the time it was happening.