The Best Sci Fi Audiobooks

What makes a great audiobook narration?

Well, you’re going to get a wide range of opinions on that one. But since you’re only talking to me, unfortunately you’re just getting the one. What I think makes a really great audiobook narration is lifting the story in such a way that the listener feels like an active participant in the book. It’s not about my performance, it’s about the book. I have to do as much as I possibly can, with my skills and craft and all of that, to ease the passage between the author and the listener/reader. I want people to feel like they got the book; I’m less interested in what they think of me after.

It’s a tricky proposition. There are some narrators who don’t characterise voices or do accents or differentiate between characters. There are others who do. I’m in the latter camp, and it’s all in the name of you having the most immediate experience you possibly can with the book.

Tell us about your first choice: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, which is narrated by Scott Brick. First, for anyone not familiar! – what is Jurassic Park about?

Hmm… Someone thinks it’d be fun to raise lizards at home and then things go bad.

That’s a very accurate summary. Thank you. What makes Scott Brick’s narration a top choice?

Scott is one of the pillars of audiobook narration – I’ll mention a couple of the others in a moment. When I started doing audiobooks, everyone was saying, Scott Brick is the deal. Scott Brick and Simon Vance are the two narrators that I heard the most when I was beginning, and I still hear their names more than mine, damn it! No, I’m kidding. He’s a friend now, and he always gets to do the most amazingly interesting titles, and he manages to make them incredibly interesting. It’s not for nothing that he gets these great titles. So for him to be narrating such an emblematic piece of work, something that is so enormous, is entirely appropriate. The story is in good hands with him, he’s one of the greats.

Many of us know the film – how cinematic is an audiobook experience? Are there… dinosaur noises?

Haha! No, I don’t think Scott’s doing dinosaur noises. Oh, I can’t wait to tell him that, I’ll offer it up as a suggestion. But you ask a really good question regarding audiobook narration. We’re not doing a movie, we’re doing the book. Sometimes, rarely, books will have sound effects or music to support stuff, but that’s done later in post-processing. When the narrator is narrating the book, it’s just the book. It is as if I were sat in your lounge reading to you aloud. So if the author includes dinosaur noises, then you do have to try to approximate that as best you can. Thankfully, I don’t think Crichton really did that in this book. At the most you’ll have onomatopoeia – you know, “The door opened with a screech,” and maybe they’ll write 16 “e”s. Then you obviously need to do something about that. But it is all about just telling the story from the book – you’re not converting the book to other media.

You’ve already mentioned Simon Vance, so let’s turn to your next choice: Market Forces by Richard Morgan. It’s a near-future satire of globalisation, with a corporate ‘Conflict Investment’ department supporting foreign governments and rebel groups… As a book it won the John W Campbell award, and the narration won Simon Vance his sixteenth Audie award, I believe?

Yes! Vance is another of the greatest narrators that I can name. He is also a friend. And funnily enough, when I was starting out in audiobooks, I knew Simon only because I knew his wife through theatre, where I had worked with her. I don’t know why the penny didn’t drop, but I was talking to my friend’s husband, Simon, about getting into audiobooks, and I knew who Simon Vance was, and we were sat at a pub in Oregon where I was doing theatre… and at the table is when the penny dropped, that that was Simon Vance. Anyway, he’s since become a dear friend. I was helping him go through the rubble of his house as a result of the Altadena fires recently, and actually unearthed a few of his awards, Audie awards and things like that. So he’s rebuilding and continuing with books. And he’s one of the greatest narrators there is, along with Scott Brick. He started out as a reader for Radio 4, originally from Brighton, and is just a wonderful storyteller. I can’t say enough about him.

We work in a wide variety of different genres. Obviously, this is focused on sci fi, but Simon has so many titles in other genres that are amazing, as does Scott; I have a few, although they’ve slotted me really heavily into sci fi and military history and thrillers and stuff like that. That’s just what happens. But if you are interested in a book by either Scott or Simon, you’re in great hands.

The thing about sci fi is that you’re dealing with a heightened reality, a conceit. There’s a request that the reader, the listener, suspend their disbelief.  I think of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: “It is required you do awake your faith.” Here are people conversing in English on a planet 10,000 years in the future: there’s got to be a suspension of disbelief. It calls for a commitment to the text when you’re narrating it, which I think is a little bit different than, say, a nonfiction title. Someone like Simon, someone like Scott, someone like some of the other narrators mentioned here are great choices for that because they’re willing to go there. You don’t catch a note of the narrator not necessarily believing what’s going on. They’re committed to the story. And it’s really important, especially with sci fi: you have to commit.

And, I imagine, check a few pronunciations before you start?

Yes, you do. Sometimes there’ll be scientific pronunciations you need to absolutely double check, and then obviously there will be made-up things, and perhaps the author has a specific sound for that planet or that person or that thing in mind. And if you’re starting into a series that has already been established, where these books have fans and they’re finally being turned to audio, it’s a great idea to do some research on what the accepted pronunciation of this thing is; because listeners as an audience, I have found, are very, very outspoken. They have a real sense of ownership about what they listen to, and have no problem telling you when you have done something in error.

That certainly applies to your third choice, which is Simon Vance again, narrating Frank Herbert’s Dune. Could you introduce us?

Frank Herbert’s saga has so many different parallels in various philosophies in the history of the world. It’s huge, sweeping, vast, with so many different characters. Obviously, there’s allegorical connections to the Christian Bible and to several other hero-saviour journeys in various faiths around the world. So already, the book itself is carrying huge weight. The books have been around for such a long time that there are people who name their children after some of these characters. And so you’re given the task of narrating the book. What do you do at that point?

Well, obviously you listen to what is the accepted way of conveying certain things – character names, place names, that sort of thing – so that it doesn’t trip anyone up. Carrying something like Dune, that is so huge, is unenviable. I was doing Shakespeare for twenty years on the West Coast of the United States as an American, and the minute I step on stage, there’s an argument being made that I should be here, I should be telling this story. There’s a cultural weight on that. And the same is true for something like Dune, which is so much a part of people’s lives and has been for such a long time. So you obviously approach the text with respect, but you also have to tell the story the best you can. I can’t think of anybody else better to narrate Dune.

We’ve discussed two of Vance’s Audie-award-winning books – could we talk about yours? Could you tell us about narrating Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary? First, what’s the book about?

Without giving too much away, because Andy Weir is wonderful at preserving a surprise in the book… Essentially, a fellow named Ryland Grace wakes up completely disoriented, not knowing where he is, and in short order figures out that he’s on a spacecraft. Through the book, he has to piece together what is going on. Things start to come back to him slowly. And ultimately, it’s about saving the Earth, but it’s also about so many more things, and I don’t want to say anything more in case I give anything away!

I will say that it is one of my favourites that I’ve gotten to narrate. It was one where I was running to the microphone every day, looking forward to recording, and I was deeply, deeply sad when it was finished. I enjoyed that book so much. The audiobook does incorporate some audio production, for reasons that I can’t go into that would give things away, but they help lift the text and the story.

Andy just wrote a great book here – which is currently being made into a movie. (Of course I’d rather you listen to the book than watch the movie, or listen to the book first, then go watch the movie.) It was wonderful – you know the feeling as a reader when you open a book and you just kind of fall into it, and you feel held up by it, you’re in that world? It was completely immersive in that way. I loved it.

To read a book like that, is there a long preparation process, or do you discover things in the studio?

There’s a lot of different paths to telling a story in an audiobook, and a lot of different narrators use a variety of tactics to get there. There are some who really research each character and mark out who’s who before they start, and they’ll pre-read the book a couple of times before they do it. Earlier in my career I tried that, and it didn’t go well for me. This is only for me – I’m not saying this is the way to do it – but for me, I found that the least amount of prep is best. I know it’s like I’m telling you, “Yes, I put my socks on over my head”, but it is – it’s more immediate. I once made the analogy that I felt like I was serving reheated vegetables when I over-researched a book. When something in the story is affecting me, it’s affecting you simultaneously, that’s the goal.

Now that means I make a lot of mistakes. It means I really have to check the pronunciation guide, if one is provided, and I need to ask the author or the producer, “How do you say this?” Once you have all of that stuff taken care of, then you just allow the story to carry us. You, the listener; me, the narrator; we go on this journey together. That’s my philosophy of doing it. Lots of other narrators work differently, and they have great success with it.

That’s really fascinating. Something closer to the freshness of improv…

Yes, I did improv with the Groundlings for a time. They say the gold is in the grey area. Doing improv, if you have a plan, it’s going to fall down dead, so you have to be open to everything. And that is kind of how I approach telling a story, which worked great for this book, because the character is very much like that: he’s taking in information and then responding off that. There is no overarching plan. So it helps to have that kind of style. Now, had I been doing Dune, that would be a very different situation. You do what the book requires, I think is the best way.

But for me, yes, it’s been very much seat of the pants. It means I mess up all the time, and I’ll get notes. And the way the process works, without going too deep into this, is that you finish the book, you send it off, they proof it, and then send you back an Excel spreadsheet, basically, of where you screwed up – where you said something wrong, if there was a noise, whatever. Then you re-do those, send them off, they punch them in, and they make a nice, clean, tidy audiobook for people to listen to. So I have had things where I’ve mispronounced something consistently in spite of my best research, and I’ll have 1700 pickups, and it’s all just that one thing I mispronounced. So you have to be very careful about things like that. The nice thing with something like Hail Mary is it’s all new, and ultimately the setting is less important than the relationships between the characters. That story needs to be told. Then you can be anywhere, sailing ship, spaceship…

I don’t know if I’d find the idea of an Excel sheet of my mistakes comforting or horrifying!

Well, you get real used to it, you know? You’re like, “Well, okay, I didn’t get that right. All right, thank God there’s someone watching!” The last thing you want is for that mistake to get out, because you will hear about it online.

Haha, I’m sure. Ok, let’s talk about your fourth choice: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, narrated by Bronson Pinchot. This is actually the fourth in this hit series about Area X – the first, Annihilation, has been recommended multiple times on Five Books – so it’s hard to talk about the plot without spoilers. But could you tell us about Pinchot’s work?

Pinchot is a genius, and one of the finest actors I’ve ever worked with. We became friends years ago. His work in audiobooks is incredible. He has an encyclopedic, geometric way of thinking as an approach to a character. I think he’s wonderfully suited to something like sci fi, which we discussed the conceits of before – the ‘Hey, believe this!’ With Bronson, you have no trouble, because he goes there. He’s an immensely, immensely talented narrator and actor, and if you’re going along with him, you’re very safe.

It’s a very tense series, real thriller stuff. I imagine that’s very easily overdone…

Yes, it can be. But again, if you approach the book with the attitude of ‘It’s not about me, it’s about the book,’ the tension will carry and be appropriately placed. Histrionics in front of the mic kills the book. So you do what is required to tell the story. Now, at the end of a day narrating tension like that, you need three or four hours in a sauna and some light massage to try and relax…

Your final choice is Harry Myers’ work on the Warhammer 40k series, most recently Da Big Dakka by Mike Brooks. Could you introduce us?

Harry Myers is a voice actor that I first came to know on a project in London, and his flexibility with characters, his ability to embody anything you can think of, is second to none. So for something as extreme as Warhammer, I can’t think of anybody better placed to carry that story. He is one of those actors who’s just like, “Okay, I’m on a ladder in a rubber suit hanging upside down, speaking Latin? Great. Sign me up” – and he’ll do it beautifully. Something like Warhammer would be incredibly daunting to me, were I to have to narrate that; but I have a feeling Harry’s like, “No problem,” and just got on with it. He’s a genius.

I sometimes feel with large cast books like that, the audiobook is helpful because you’re not doing so much work as a reader to keep all those characters apart in your head…

Yes, if somebody is doing that work for you, that’s true – at least for the narrators who do different characterizations or different voices. It does help. I’ve had people say before, “Oh, I always knew who was talking because of the voice that you did.” And particularly when you’re talking about something vast, like Warhammer, or like Dune, where you’re like, “Wait, who is this dude?” and you’re scrolling back several pages to figure it out… It’s helpful, yes.

Are there any other ways you think audiobooks offer an improvement on the reading experience?

Boy, have I seen online debates about that! There are a lot of people who feel that certain books should be heard even more than read. I’m not going to get into the whole is-audiobook-listening-really-reading, because I think that’s an antiquated, Edwardian philosophy about taking in stories… Long before there was written text, there were people sitting around a fire telling stories. It is the oldest form of storytelling. You just happen to be listening to it on your phone.

Some people have said Project Hail Mary is better listened to than read, and I’m not stupid enough to say that is because of my brilliance, but it’s because of the production of the book and the way things are handled in that. I think there are other books that definitely are elevated, the experience is elevated by listening to them. I’m obviously an advocate for reading in any form, whether it be through your ears or through your eyes. And I’m happy that so many people are listening to audiobooks.

There are so many narrators and so many great books that in just the sci fi genre alone, you’ll be listening until the end of time anyhow. So if you’re curious at all, if you’re not someone who’s a big audiobook listener, take the risk and give it a go. I think, particularly in the genre of sci fi, you’ll find it entertaining in a really wonderful way.