Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.
Man I wish I could enjoy Wheaton’s narration style but after trying to listen to John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire and hearing every single character given the same tone deaf voice (literally tone deaf: not like saying racist things but rather had the same sarcastic and smug tone of voice for everyone irrespective of character descriptions or even explicit tones given like “she said morosely”) I refuse to buy another book he has narrated.
Amber Benson it is then.
On the topic of Will Wheaton narrating audiobooks, do I understand correctly that the version of The Martian narrated by R.C. Bray is no longer available to purchase on Audible and is now replaced by one done by Wheaton?
I activately look for books narrated by R. C. Bray. I love his style. And he nailed the downeast Maine accent in Expeditionary Force.
R. C. Bray has a great voice. He should narrate audio books.
Wild that they’d replace an excellent voice actor with a incredibly mediocre one.
But Wil is famous so …
The real weird thing is the cover art provided with the R. C. Bray version published by Podium Publishing is the movie poster with Matt Damon’s face on it, the current version narrated by Wheaton uses the original book cover of space suit b/w orange.
Makes me wonder if Wil Wheaton low-key didn’t want to be narrating the book at all, and maybe his sarcastic smug tone was a reflection of how he felt about the whole damn job. Maybe he felt he wasn’t getting paid enough etc
It seems that AI audiobooks are not for you.
Definitely not. But what does that have anything to do with Wil’s awful narration?
Their narration can be fairly bland from what I’ve heard.
I don’t like audiobooks, so that’s second hand.
Would that be Early Riser by Jasper Fforde? If not, I’m very curious what the book was.
It’s Lock-In by John Scalzi. After a ~weird flu~, a large portion of the population are left paraplegic and can only interact with the world by remotely controlling humanoid robots. It’s still fairly early on in the tech, so most folks are walking around in generic of the shelf units that are only a few generations removed from the Boston Dynamics or Atlas robots.
It was a really weird novel to be reading during the first week of Covid shutdowns.
Huh, thank you for the summary! What a strange (but fascinating) premise. Definitely a weird book to have during the first week of COVID shutdowns… All the zombie apocalypse stories also hit rather differently when read during COVID lockdown 😅
It’s probably worth mentioning that the book’s a police procedural / crime novel. 👍 It takes place about 25 years after the fictional pandemic. The story starts off with a robot-piloting protagonist’s first day on the job as part of the FBI’s robot-crimes division. It almost won a Hugo and is worth taking a look at if the premise sounds interesting.
What books are those? Sounded like murdebot diaries until the end.
Search for “wil wheaton amber benson audiobook verge” and their story on the book and its sequel should be the first thing that pops up.
Oh, the sequel to Lock In, by Scalzi. I haven’t read Lock In yet, but I know about it. It would probably have been a Hugo nominee except a whole bunch of right wing types banded together to vote for books that were less inclusivity-minded. They were successful, and Scalzi was one who lost out. Here’s an article from the time it was happening.
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Probably how Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were meant to be until the publisher told the author: “Hey listen we can only afford to print one book ten thousand times. Not eleven books nine hundred times.”
In reality, with how fast information spreads on the internet, all the different endings would be quickly cataloged. The alleged 11th one would be mentioned, but it would soon be well-known that nobody has seen it. Which ending was best would be an interesting point of discussion.
…Assuming the books were even popular, of course.
Yeah this would work quite well before the internet became popular.
Last February, Undertale creator Toby Fox sent newsletters by e-mail with 3 random banners of Deltarune characters saying something, with various degrees of rarity. They were all collected within 2 days, including one that only appeared 1 out of 1.000.000 times. However, it should be noted that the Deltarune community is fucking crazy (in a good sense).
It would depend on how rare the rarest endings are. If there are only a handful of copies of one of the endings and the handful of people that got it don’t engage with the online fan community (not everyone who reads books are online about it), those people might not even know there are different endings, let alone that they have a rare one.
Which would also negate whatever chaos the author was trying to sow.
This is literally the movie version of Clue.
Book version no?
The movie starts with “based on the famous novel”.
Chaos ensues.
The Coen Brothers said Fargo was based on a true story.
It is not true that a lady died trying to recover the money in the movie however. That death was ruled a suicide and then rumors started spreading.
This is like the pig prank for your school
You release three angry aggressive slop covered pigs into your school and spray paint them #1, #2 and #4
OP generously assumes that not only will people read their books, but also care about the subsequent shenanigans
That’s why they gotta be a famous author first.
Yeah, this would work if Patrick Rothfuss ever released book 3 of the King killer Chronicals.
Ah okay, I wasn’t sure if famous meant best selling. Like Camus is famous but he’s not best selling.
Camus can do but Sartre is smartre.
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Books of course do get read. It happens sometimes.
No way
OP generously assumes
Yes, OP used the word ‘If’.
And that a book written in such a way to support 10 different endings would be good enough to support online arguments.
Idk, people love mystery boxes
Depends on the type of book and how much of it would be rewritten for each ending i could see the possibility of it being good and supporting enough endings, it would just be a lot of work.
This kind of happened with the last Chris Rock stand-up special. He flubbed the last joke pretty badly, which everyone who saw it within the first few days saw. Then Netflix edited it without making any sort of announcement and made it seem like he nailed it. People were arguing online about him nailing the final joke, not realizing that they were both right in what they saw. It was kind of an interesting study in the power of editing.
You sometimes get this in movies as well where the take that they use in the trailer is different from the take that’s in the actual film. Usually it’s the same words but with slightly different inflections. It’s close enough to always make you wonder.
Pacific Rim is a classic example. The rousing speech in the trailer is so much better than the one in the film.
Indiana Jones.
Trailer “part-time”.
Film “PART time”My thoughts exactly!
But for that one, wasn’t the take used in the trailer better than the one used in the movie? I still can’t understand how that happened…
Would this be possible to do? Publishers would usually use different ISBNs for this, giving it all away, but apparently self-publishing is a thing
Self publish, provide ocr-free pdfs (i.e. images where you can’t highlight the text) no epub or mobi because if you can extract the text, it would be easy to diff the text. And there are tools to ocr un ocr’d pdfs with varying degrees of error…maybe take up book binding and mail print bound books with beautiful artwork no one would want to deface…how much work you want to put into this joke?
Assumes their book would be wildly popular despite having to write 10 cohesive plausible endings.
Your press operators would leak the info.
Wasn’t this the theatrical run of the movie “Clue”?
I think there were 3 endings that varied by region, but in the pre-internet times this did very little to effect discussion.
Also, the VHS release included all the endings.
sadfsdfasfasf
And then you actually write 12 endings.
And then keep the 13th in a bank box, and the 14th world shattering ending is kept in one of the 10 boxes of misc note paper in your attic.
And your last words will be: “There is another ending”
Last words are, “I here by canonize any and all endings written by owner of this note”
This reminds me of the book Telephone by Percival Everett. No secret extra ending but there were multiple versions of the book, one with a dramatically different ending. I really enjoyed reading it- and then looking up the differences.
A visual novel that’s actually a novel? I wouldn’t mind that.
