Mike and Heather

This is a wonderful piece! The writing is great, the narration is fantastic. I could barely turn it off.

I'm a fantasy/SF audio book fan. Although this one is a Zombie/horror book, it aims more toward a general audience than the typical genre piece. Doesn't go for cheap gross-out or suspense, which I wouldn't like.

I borrowed a copy of the Eye of the World from a schoolmate in the mid 90s. I have been waiting since then for this moment.

I was not disappointed.

More than once I found myself sitting at my desk crying.

I'm very satisfied.

I love how the narrator really went for it with all the songs. It would be easy to just rattle them off like poems, but this dude dove right in. Beauty!

I'm enraged with everyone I know that they didn't tell me about Harry Dresden until now.

The story is great, and the fairly roughly edited narration only adds to the atmosphere. In another product the breathing and swallowing and pausing would be unacceptable, but in this product it is exactly perfect. A cleanly edited narration would sound too sterile for such a gritty and grungy story.

I tend toward epic 15+ hour books, but I've been enjoying this series immensely.

Like the other reviewers, I found the sound effects (particularly the section end "music") extremely jarring. I looked it up, it was made in 1973 and sounds like it...


That said, everything else is exactly what you'd expect from a dramatization. The script is just fine, and the actors are just fine. The pacing is good, and it was (again, excepting the discordant sound effects) enjoyable.


I'd feel ripped off spending a whole credit on this one, but for 2 bucks it's perfectly acceptable. I'd recommend it to Asimov fans in particular, but perhaps not for a general SF audience. It's 3 starts to me, but it might be only 1 star for someone who loves Asimov just a little bit less.

OK, so I think that in the fantasy/SF audio book community we've been spoiled a bit. We're surrounded by several really good narrators: Stefan Rudnicki, Scott Brick, Reading/Kramer, and many more. Now all of a sudden along comes On Basilisk Station, read by a "merely" competent narrator, and we react in horror.

Honestly, I listened to this book in relatively few sittings (I had a couple of lengthy flights to sit through) and I found the story to be acceptably presented. Not excellent, not terrible, but acceptable. Acceptable enough that I will be grabbing the sequels as quickly as my credits renew.

(I have indeed read the novels previously, a few years ago.)

P.S. This is Mike - Heather is my wife, and her name is on the account here at Audible. :P