I loved the first Audible recording of this series, Prelude the Foundation, but I am having a really hard time getting into this one, Forward the Foundation. The narrator has a great voice but he reads so painfully slow and without any inflection or intonation from sentence to sentence. Its a struggle to stick with and I don't think I can take 14 hours of it.

Foundation is a great story.

The Foundation novels are among the very best novels in science fiction. The audiobook versions read by Scott Brick are fantastic. But this narrator is no Scott Brick. Not even remotely. He is terribly suited for narrating a work of fiction. He has no voices, accents, intonations, style, rhythm, or anything that qualifies him to narrate a novel. He is better suited for narrating nonfiction.

It's just not worth it. I bought all the Foundation audiobooks because I wanted to listen to these books I love so much, read by a wonderfully talented narrator. But two of these audiobooks are completely useless to me. I find it difficult to believe that anybody actually listened to this to its completion. This is a great book, however.

I think people deserve a refund for this. We see the that the cover art is identical, and the publisher is the same, so we assume this is the same quality as the other novels. But this edition, as well as Foundation and Earth, are read by the same narrator who is wholly unsuitable to the role.

The book is fine, but the narration is terrible. I wasn't able to make it through the entire book. It sounds like a robot is reading it.

N/A

Anyone but

Didn't finish.

Please, re-record the book.

This series is terrific. The McKeever narration sounds like a kindle text to speech version. I can't tell if its the production or the narrator. Give me Scott Brick for this series!

Delivery is monotone. No difference in speech patterns among any of the characters. This is my single worst Audible listen ever.

none

Based on another review, I decided to listen to this book with my audio speed at 1.5. It was way better than the normal rate from narrator. I enjoyed this final Foundation story (I did them all in published order). I think I will do the robot series next!

The continuing story

learning to tune out the narrator and listen to the story

NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER.... I'd rather stick needles in my eyeballs.

Scott Brick, where are you? How could you take a pass on this?

There is no performance, It's like he was a text to speech program. He would be fine for a technical journal but not for a novel. I sped up the reading (on an iPod) and this actually made it better because the pauses between words had a smaller impact and reading felt more fluid even with the distorted tone.

I'm not sure I can finish the book as it is. I hope they release a new reading of this novel with Scott Brick. He did a great job on the previous Foundation novels.

If presented by McKeever, no. If re-recorded by a new artist, most likely yes.

Asimov's galaxy view is fun and interesting and the Foundation and Empire aspects are worthy of inspection. 25,000,000 inhabited worlds, 40,000,000,000 folks on ONE PLANET. It's all kind of out there and fun. And after the fact, I think that the Foundation and Empire of the 40s/50s series really benefited from the prequels and postludes.

If you are a fan then you are going to be interested in the formation/creation of Psychohistory.

Dors. She's cute, tough and a 'bot. What more could you want. :-)

No. I would not recommend this book as narrated by Larry McKeever. I listen to audio books on my iPhone using the Audible App. In order to even begin to listen to this book, I had to bump up the spoken speed to 1.5x normal. Mr. McKeever speaks SO SLOWLY. I'm not some speed freak, I'm seriously stating that the speed of oration is abominably slow. I haven't sampled the audio and done this experiment but I believe it might be possible to see EVERY WORD SPOKEN as a discrete element in the wave form of the audio file.

Problem two. There is almost NO DRAMATIZATION. Oh the pitch of the voice might rise a bit to denote a question. Some other minor embellishments may be added. But basically this reading sound like an excellent computer text to speech reading of the book. In fact, no kidding, I actually started to think that when I was perhaps 30 minutes into the book. But, you can tell it's a human. and the copyright blurb somewhere dates the recording to the 1990s.

I'm thinking that perhaps back then books were more often than not read flat with no artistry. I'd call a modern reader an actor/artist more than a reader. Many of them speak in different voices for the different main characters. It can be a very impressive thing when done right and once heard that way, the really flat recitations of the text in books becomes substantially more boring than it probably was when that type of presentation was the norm.

So, I listened to the entire book regardless of all this negative criticism. Why? Because I was stuck in the foundation heptalogy and wanted to know... how did Seldon create Psychohistory. I suffered through it and if you are into this series of books so can you. It isn't totally unlistenable, just significantly so.

WAY TOO LONG for that.

Only if a big Foundation fan.

Its best and worst characteristic is that it is trivia. We already know psychohistory was developed.

He is ponderous at best. When he reads conversations, its like he is talking to an idiot. During narrative parts, he sometimes has a better flow.

No.

Very Bad Sound

There was no performance. He could not pronounce the names correctly.