Craig Charles is such a great storyteller, but for some reason he just mumbles his way through the entire audiobook, and it's hard to understand him when he mumbles. Where was his producer? Transitioning to the recording studio is really hard, and keeping a live feel to your voice takes practice and a good producer to coach the talent. Studios are disorientingly quiet places, and it's tempting to speak softly. I suspect Chris Barrie spends a lot of time in studios perfecting his voices. I agree, Rob's agonoids are great, and I like his reading style, but there's another production problem. His voice requires special handling to make it "pop" clearly - a different mic, different pre-amps, different mastering, more air in the eq, a livelier studio, something. His voice is his voice, and he doesn't seem to have a lot of bright overtones naturally, which make up the majority of what the human ear hears in speech. He reads very well though. (He could project a little better.) His opening sequence with Rimmer as a little boy running the race is quite sensitive and moving. "Every good boy..." (No spoilers.) He could have used a bit of help from his producer and engineer though.
@Tacitus Kilgore Yes, in this book, Chris does everything. Not what I was referring to. I was replying to comments that are no longer there. Someone seems to have said something about the agonoids in Rob Grant's reading of *Backward*, which I agreed with, and there is still a comment above referring to Michael McGruder from Craig's reading of *The Last Human*, the 3rd and 4th books in this series, not this specific book. It looks like there had been more discussion of those 2 books than just that, but I don't recall. My post of course is long and wordy because I'm a studio nut and I can't resist. Sorry 'bout the confusion, but when accounts are closed or comments removed, replies to those comments can look out of place after a while.
It's on the very same shelf, the best shelf, the shelf with the heaviest load to bear, bibliophile's every where, do say your prayer, for the screws so held or the glue that welds, save these treasure from earths gravity well.
I'm totally with you. Those three women are very well-developed characters for having such brief appearances. Part of that is Chris Barrie developing their personal expressiveness, but they are written very well too. Rob and Doug are the masters of one-dimensional characters who really aren't one-dimensional once you get to know them. Everyone comes complete with a back-story, personal quirks, and motivation that makes sense. They didn't have to do that with the women of the Nova 5. I think they were just showing off :-P
Well, it may be different in these audio books but on the TV show after the Lister last man alive thing ran dry Holly's image became a woman and they may have been one of the first to do story arcs over multiple episodes as the ship encountered a series of aliens in ships or on planets. They passed through some alien spaces and had some involved adventures. The show was known for having a high degree of consistency and detail even among its absurdity. I'm planning to listen to all these books one by one. 😁
I was curious which Kryten voice Chris Barrie would do, and I guess it makes sense to do Robert Llewellyn's for all the audiobooks, even though it sounds a bit weird when you're used to hearing certain lines in David Ross's voice.
Listening to that part right now. Yeah, on the Nova 5, Kryten is David Ross to me ("I was only away two minutes!"), but he's Robert L everywhere else, and I s'pose it's not practical for Chris to do both voices. Still, I'd love to hear Chris Barrie's David Ross impression! :)
I sometimes wonder if Holly took over the duplicate Rimmer and made him horrible to original Rimmer, so that he could go back to doing his job, which is keeping Lister sane :D
That would be funny, but I found it so endearing in the chapter after Rimmer and his double’s big spat that they made a point of saying how og Rimmer changed just after his time spent with Lister. Character development hell yeah
So I know the show revels in its up opportunities to break out Lister's untapped potential, but him learning about space mining in this novel and actually being kind of excited about it proper caught me off guard.
In the TV series, there are references to him having brains he's never used (i.e., The Inquisitor). Yeah, he acts kinda dumb in some ways too, but he's also very motivated to get home. I think that mining sequence is incredibly funny, but what I don't get is how anyone could persuade the Cat to go along in the first place, let alone expecting him to work.
@@SamuelBlack84 LOL! Or maybe... lady cats ;-D (I would love to see that whole scene done for TV. I would love to see his audacious ore truck and how he drives it!)
@@davidfortier6976 I hope he got that same award that Jim Dale got for reading the American version of the Harry Potter books. Chris Barrie's performance here is on par with if not better than Jim Dale's.
In a way. They both come from the same tradition as Monty Python. Good old English humor. Wackiness with no barbs, no slams. Like the way Wierd Al Yankovic gets the permission of the artists of the songs he parodies because he is not mean.
Chris Barrie was my brief, but marvelous refuge when the Dresden Files audiobooks ran out (though I must warn you that the narrator started acting and started doing the voices and rapidly improving on it only around book 4-ish).
You takin' the smeg? I'm A-smegging-merican, and we know how to talk right! And we can spell even better :D Measure your meters and liters, mind your odors and colors in the theater, and remember the best defense is a good offense. Word etiology is no excuse for unnecessary letters. There is no "o" in diarrhea! And I think you'll find that the word "smeg" entered the English lexicon around the year 2144, when an American astro first used it as an interjection when travelling in a two-person shuttle craft with a British companion, the latter of whom suffered from a nearly terminal episode of flatulence. The poor Yank found that holding his nose had proven entirely inadequate.
I've just realized that Lister is a truly awful person. He makes everyone go to Earth even though he's the only one with a desire to go there (Rimmer is from Io, the only home Cat has ever known is Red Dwarf and Kryten wanted to shut himself down). He brings Kryten back to life primarily to get info about the duality drive. He claims to hate slavery, but forces Cat & Kryten to mine for ore against their will because he wants to go back to Earth. He orders Kryten to "relax" which he dislikes, even though it is cleaning that brings him joy. He makes Rimmer believe he is going to be erased in order to coerce the Gazpacho soup story out of him. Smeg!
you raised a really good point threre that is a bit selfish of him. but what do you expect them all to do wonder around deep space untill they find a earthy type planet ?
@@davidfortier6976 Dave is never presented as anything but a deadbeat, a thief, a drunk, and a bum. He didn't reach maturity until after he'd been left for 34 years on Garbage World. He is not a tower of moral strength, but he is compassionate, if a bit ignorant in how he expresses it. He thinks he's helping Kryten and the Cat. The worst he ever does to Rimmer is mere mischief, and he does beg for it. But really, this whole series is about Lister's learning not to be a complete smegpot.
To be fair, it's an issue of jurisprudence: only Lister has any legal right to any kind of autonomous existence and as such, the other crew members have to fall in line; both Kryten as a mechaniod and the Cat as an animal, are both legally property and consequently have no authority; Rimmer is in a similar situation, having lost his human rights, subsequent to his death.
The only way I can make sense of Kryten is that he came from a bad batch of service droids with programming errors in their logic circuits. Normal droids must know that humans don't live for millions of years and know what it means when they stop moving. Imagine there was a product recall just after the Nova 5 launched but the crew missed it or planned to return Kryten after the mission, perhaps underestimating the damage that could be done with a defective service droid on board. x
That would explain why he thought cleaning electronics with soap and water was a good idea. Either that or DivaDroid International is just a bunch of cheap penny-pinching corner-cutting smeg-heads.
I can’t believe Kryten’s creators didn’t put the proper procedures for cleaning electrical equipment like computers into his programming. Darn cheap penny-pinching corner-cutting DivaDroid International smeg heads.
I think perhaps it would be women and Scotsmen. I'd be a little nervous playing one while wearing a kilt, even the conventional style cello, and not a decadive.
Everything in Red Dwarf is the wrong way Lister who is a dirty slob with no ambition is the normal one and Rimmer who does everything the right way is the screwed up one. Funny
Yes, but Lister has a great personality and treats people well. Rimmer may be by the book, but his personality and temperament is that of a Rottweiler with toothache.
Because when a hologram doesnt sleep to perform maintenance on their program, they go nuts. Files get corrupted and they die. Remember George from the first episode? He stayed online for 20 months without maintenance. In the end he was walking backwards singing We will rock you in Esperanto while wearing a red and white Gingham dredd and tea cosy on his head. Last thing he said was "SPLEEERG!" and he jumped out of the airlock. Now Holly ensures Rimmer is debugged at least once a week and has the latest copy of Malwarebytes installed since the Holovirus situation.
