Audio preview

There were three, ahem, items of pop culture that influenced me greatly when I was growing up. Every story I write or outline is in some way a rip-off inspired by at least one of these. Apart from being incomplete in my perception of them (that is, I started reading/watching from the middle and was forced to quit before the end), they don't have a lot in common.

One is a critically acclaimed BBC series, recognized as "the best thing BBC ever made" in 2005. It's called Quatermass and the Pit, and you should watch it because it's awesome. Here's in fact the exact quote:

"Quatermass and the Pit is simply the first finest thing the BBC ever made. It justifies licence fees to this day." --BBC, 2005

(Assholes. No it doesn't justify license fees, screw British spelling while we're at that, it justifies knighting Nigel Kneale - he died in 2006, too bad - releasing the movie under C-zero and including it into school curriculum.)

Another is The Saga of Pliocene Exile, which is quite good as a sci-fi series, though no pinnacle of literary achievement. It does right almost every aspect of fantasy/sci-fi that Star Wars did wrong (commercial success is not a factor I consider here) and as such is a sci-fi book recommendation.

The third series is just bad, so bad I don't mention it by name in exalted company as something I ever liked. However, my kiddie brain had filtered out anti-humanist shit, and the resulting shard of a storyline (I didn't get my hands on the first and last volumes until much, much later) has forever lodged itself in my eye.

When I finally did get hold of the book-end volumes, the nostalgia factor worked in the book's favor - but it wasn't the only one.

I read the series off a screen, at my own pace. I could read over and over the shinyawesome bits, voice-act the dialogue in my head (I'm horrible at images, even more horrible in translating them to paper, but good at imaginary voice-acting - Mom would probably say I should thank music school) - but more importantly, I could skim the shit.

And now I'm listening to the audio version, and it hurts. Going over the choice bits takes effort (extracting the player from my pocket and pressing the Pause button), there's no speeding up the stupid, and the repeated phrases make my teeth ache. Every time I hear "the dead outnumber the living", I want to climb a street lighting pole and sing a lullaby to the moon. Every time the author's voice, relaying the main character's thoughts, makes a comparison that takes a dump on the character's cultural background, I want to eat a live electric eel and wash it down with absinthe.

The point is:
Fiction books are not required to be easily convertible to audiobooks. There can be visual gags, homographs, polysemes, neat formatting tricks, page references, appendixes and footnotes, Julian-May-style typesetter's-nightmare vignettes, song texts that the reader has to put to music under his own power, maps and charts and coded messages for the characters and the reader to decipher. But everything that sounds FUCKING RETARDED has to be MERCILESSLY AXED.