The Wind over the World

By: Steven Utley

Narrated by: Shondra Marie

They had a doorway into the past. But it didn't just open on a specific place on a certain day. There was a sort of flutter, and it caused spatial drift and temporal spread. Two probes might go through together on the 21st-century side but come out miles and years apart on the Silurian side. So, when the second of two people going through a portal into the past is lost, the first feels an abstract guilt that eats into her pleasure at having traveled through time. This story is part of the author's brilliant Silurian Tales series.©1996 Dell Magazines (P)2006 AudioText

A very amateurish production

The description of this story sounded intriguing, and it was fairly short (just over an hour) so that it can be completed in one sitting, which I like. However, I could not make head nor tail of it because of the amateurish production. The quality of the sound was BAD, and the reader read at race horse speed, and swallowed many of her words. She sounded like a twittery teenager. For ease of comprehension, the reading should be at a medium pace, with all the words crisply and clearly enunciated, and no fancy vocal gymnastics. Particularly with deteriorating hearing, such as I have, it sounded like a lot of gobbledegook. I don't want to appear sexist, but there are very few women who can do a half-decent job of reading. I gave up listening after ten minutes. Maybe a younger person, used to contemporary youth-speech, would have got more out of this story.