KAZ Vorpal, aka Michael Karl

Distracting Mistakes

Revisado: 01-10-25

Foster is a passable writer. It's an okay premise, though he's no master wordsmith. But the reader is dull in style and a bit dim in wit. For example, he pronounces the home planet of the insect Thranx, Hivehome, as hivvuh-home. Rips you out of the story every time. What was he thinking?

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Clever Premise, Okay Reader

Revisado: 07-28-24

The story is a relatively original version of the normal Moorcock-influenced science fiction of the era.

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Understand What This Is

Revisado: 07-31-23

This is better than a translation. It is read in the original Middle English, but with the vowels shifted to the modern pronunciation. Chaucer's English was different than ours, both sound and with even a few grammatic differences. We retain much of the vocabulary, but our versions of the words are often different as well.

Therefore, this takes a little time to understand, if you haven't studied middle English or older. But if you are patient or persistent, or just love language, learning, or a challenge, you WILL eventually understand it, and it will be worthwhile.

The other good news is the shifted vowels. Chaucer wrote this masterpiece 200 years before Shakespeare (who borrowed from this work, among others), in between the two writers, the way vowels in words were pronounced changed dramatically. The original pronunciation would be much more difficult than this.

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Great Book, Terrible Reader

Revisado: 05-08-22

Jim Dale pronounces names wrong, makes the characters whine, ignores author instructions on how a character says a given line, emphasizes the wrong words, et cetera.
He is an audiobook disaster.

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Great Novel, Bad Voice Choices

Revisado: 08-04-21

As an example of how poor the reader's choices of voices are, this should be the young version of Bilbo, not the old Bilbo from The Lord of the Rings movies. Yet this three and a half foot tall fellow, with a much lighter frame than a dwarf, has a heavy, deep voice. Meanwhile, Bjorn actually has a somewhat high, rather nasal voice. For an eight-foot-tall skin changer, that makes no sense at all.
aside from that, the reader makes only the usual amount of mistakes, confusing which voice to use when switching quickly, or emphasizing a word in a sentence that makes absolutely no sense in context. in this he's no worse than your average audiobook reader, but certainly no star.
he does, on the other hand, do a decent job with all of the singing and poetry, which may be why he was chosen.

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Useless

Revisado: 07-23-21

the most basic, obvious feature is lacking from this audiobook. one without which it is absolutely useless. there are no titles or authors mentioned, each poem is simply launched into without preface. If you don't already know the poems by heart, you won't know what they are.

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Good Info, but...

Revisado: 03-13-21

Louis Rukeyser is a real pro, not guilty of the mispronunciation and misemphasis of most audiobook readers. And the actual book is clearly expressed, with valuable information presented in an interesting way.

The one problem is that whenever the author quotes someone, the voice isn't Rukeyser. They hired some extras with accents that they feel sound like the original dialects, but which come across as an absurd parody. The Austrian accent, for example, sounds like Count Dracula meets Dexter, Boy Genius. Very distracting.

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Can't Pronounce Kant

Revisado: 02-14-21

The "In 90 Minutes" series is one of general mediocrity, more interesting as a quick way to sum up a few philosophers than a source of useful, or even accurate, insights about them.

But this particular episode is noteworthy in the sheer incompetence, and laziness, necessary for an audiobook reader to not know how to pronounce the name of the subject of the book he's reading. I could have overlooked this if it came up once or twice, but of course in this case it's more like once per paragraph. A constant undermining of the credibility of the reader, a tribal mantra of ignorance beating on the ears of the listener. And I don't mean that he doesn't use the correct Germanic allophone [ae], instead replacing it with [ah]. That is what I would expect, and I could live with it. But instead, he pronounces it like "can't". Which is horrifically wrong.

It's fine if you didn't know that. It would even be fine if I did not. But we should be able to count on an audiobook about Kant to get it right FOR us.

Now that I've gotten that domesticated peeve out of the way, I should make some small mention of the actual book. I have to confess that I did not finish this particular "In 90 Minutes" volume, as the ignorance of the reader was too distracting. I got perhaps halfway through, before stopping in despair. But I have completed many of the other "In 90 Minutes" books, and must say they are not something we listen to for real edification. They are a philosophical quickie, to be chewed up and spat out like bubblegum in some spare time. The actual author does not produce an objective, or even necessarily accurate, impression of the philosopher in question in each of these books. Instead, it's a quasi-clever opining of the author's own subjective and obviously-amateur views on the man thus contemplated. Not only does he cloud the view with acrimony and mocking if it's a historic person he doesn't like, but isn't even entertaining in the ways he passive-aggressively takes shots at them. It's just distracting. Meanwhile, he has an uncanny ability to focus either too much on the life of the man and not enough on the philosophy, or else just the philosophy without providing enough life story to explain it. He fails entirely to provide any kind of reasonable mixture of the man's life experiences as context AND ideas as outcome.

Because these came free with my Audible membership, and are so short, I have listened to a number of them when not up for anything serious or deep. But all too often I end up feeling I wasted my time, anyway.

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Reader Ruins the Meter

Revisado: 12-13-20

The reader keeps breaking the meter.
1. He fails to emphasize some mid-sentence rhymes, for example.
2. He keeps pausing for (melo) dramatic emphasis where the rhythm absolutely requires the he keep going smoothly.
3. He fails to run together syllables when the meter requires it.
4. He does not know the intended pronunciation of some words, breaking rhymes and rhythm.

It's so distracted that it ruins enjoyment of the poem.

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Distractingly Silly Voice Actor

Revisado: 12-05-20

The actor who plays Corum, the protagonist of this book, has a thick Scottish accent that sounds absolutely ridiculous in a mysterious, décadent being of some other race that preceded humans.

Overall, the whole execution of trying to make an audiobook–movie is very poor.

But the actual novel, like much of Michael moorcock's best material, is brilliantly written and worth suffering through the audio melodrama.

It's frustrating how hard it is to find more Cox novels, even in book form much less audiobook. I would have to pay a small fortune just to obtain same paperback copy of the Elric novels that I read as a teenager.

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