(Digression: I adore downloads for review copies of audiobooks as, if I remember correctly this came on some two dozen audiobook discs!) I admit that I was nervous that it wouldn’t live up up to my memories of the novel as a reading experience. I consider it one of the finest sf novels ever written, so I was delighted when the publicist for the Macmillan Audio sent me this some years back. I first encountered this novel in the late seventies and have read it maybe a half dozen times since then. Snark by me notwithstanding, this is a superb production well worth the time to listen to it. astronaut thrown into that weird setting spoke with a variety of Australian accents? Well welcome to the Macmillan Audio full cast adaptation of the Hugo Award winning novel where everyone has a British accent. Did you watch Farscape? If you did, you’ll remember that everyone save the U.S. But PLEASE DO NOT use this as your introduction to the dune universe, just read the book for yourself.I’m assuming that you know about Dune, so I’ll not detail it here. If you really want to relive the book without sitting down with a paperback, it works. Definitely not worth $26 or whatever it is. On a positive note, they set background music for some parts which is actually really well done and the Princess Irulan excerpts are very, very good. It was so distracting at points (Count Fenring) that I just had to skip ahead. And let me tell you, he is BAD at doing voices. Halfway through a chapter, the voice acting will just stop and it will go back to the primary narrator reading all the dialogue. Unfortunately they only do this for part of the dialogue for some reason. They brought in voice actors for the dialogue and they read it like a stage play and it actually works really well and the voice actors are great. The most distracting thing though is the way the narration changes throughout. Many pronunciations deviate from the norm, and some change throughout the book.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most poorly executed audiobooks I’ve encountered.

This is one of my favorite books, so I bought it to relive the story passively while I drive and do housework.

Dune audiobook frank herbert