Alien Voices is a group of former Star Trek actors still trying to pump some money out of the fast drying Star Trek well. For the most part, I have no problem with that. If I had been smart enough to link myself to Star Trek somehow, I would still trying to make money from it as well. Several years ago Malcolm McDowell starred as a bad buy in Star Trek Generations, easily the worst of the Star Trek movies. After filming he was interviewed and said it was fun, but he sure as hell wouldn’t be doing any conventions or having anything to those dimwit trekkies. This is like acting in a McDonald’s commercial and then telling the world your a vegetarian and would never actually eat a hamburger. I’ve had little use for the twit since. Though he did a passable job as a mad scientist in the dreadful ABC series Masters of Science Fiction.
Anyway-
Most audio books are long, like ten to twelve hours long. The idea hear being two fold, 1) you get the full unabridged version of a book just as the author wrote it, and 2) it makes those eight hour drives seem a little less tedious. So I was a bit surprised that The Invisible man clocked it at around two hours. Still, it is not exactly War and Peace we’re talking about here.
I remember watching the 1950s movie of H.G.Wells Invisible Man, but remember next to nothing about it. Just that cool scene where he unwrapped himself and someone says he’s all eaten away.
The Alien Voices Indivisible Man seems to be an accurate reading of the book, with a few sound effects added to make it feel more like an old style radio show and less like a book on tape. John “Q” de Lancie is the poor fellow who becomes invisible and Lenard “Spock” Nimoy is his idea stealing professor. The other voices in the story are an All Star Cast of Star Trek players from most of the TV Shows, though only one or two of them sounded as you might expect them to. They are acting after all and the book is set in England so there are a lot of accents to go around.
Part of the fun of the book is trying to guess who is talking, Nimoy and de Lancie sound pretty much as you expect them to sound, everyone else, well, I couldn’t tell who was who without reading the liner notes. This was a fun listen, though the sound quality on the copy I got from the library really sucked. I had the volume up all the way and still couldn’t make all of the dialog. The sound effects, of course, were loud enough to wake the dead. Maybe I just got a hold of a bad copy. I’ll see how the next one sounds. Maybe I’ll listen to Spock Vs Q next.
