If you've read Dune... conversations?

[asterroc]

I am currently listening to an unabridged audiobook¹ of Frank Herbert's Dune with a full cast doing the different characters. I am wondering about the editorial/production choice to have a full cast, and about the claim of unabridged.

The conversations as read have very little "Paul said," "Jessica replied" sort of commentary. They tend to be only what the individual people actually said. For example, if Jessica were and Paul were talking about his homework over breakfast, and Leto walked in in the middle of it...

"So did you finish your homework last night?"
"Very quickly, it was just algebra."
"And what did you learn from it?"
"If you drop a book from the top of a building, its motion is governed by a quadratic equation."
"That isn't what I was taught, since you also have to take air friction into account."
"But you can simplify the equations if you make the assumption that there isn't any air friction."
"And we haven't gotten up to air friction yet."²

In the audio book, since there are three different readers for the lines said by Paul, Jessica, and Leto, it is obvious who said what, but there aren't any "Leto walked into the conversation and commented that..." that in a print version of the book would indicate who said what in a long exchange, or if three people are involved in the conversation. Is this lack of "Paul said" actually in the original text, or was there an editorial decision to remove those? If the original text did not include any "Paul said"s, that would explain the production choice to have a cast.

And while I'm asking, is there a name for doing "Paul said"s, or for not doing them?

¹The production is copyright 2007 Audio Renaissance, and narrated by a cast listed on Audible.com as Scott Brick, Orlagh Cassidy, Euan Morton,and Simon Vance, but possibly including more.
²In case you're curious, my intent here was for the speakers to be JPJPLJP, though the last L and J could be swapped and still have it make sense.

Comments

[femetal.livejournal.com]

Just flipping through my copy, it looks like there are several two-party conversations that alternate back and forth for a page or more without any dialogue tags. It also looks like any conversations with more than two participants rely heavily on dialogue tags to avoid ambiguity (almost every line has "she said", "Paul said", etc)

I'd think that it's safe to drop any dialogue tags which have no other information when producing a "full cast recording", because the tags actually make the material far more cumbersome in that case. However, in cases where the tags give away moods, tone, actions, etc, it seems important to me that they be included for an "unabridged" label to be accurate. Of course, from an entirely purist standpoint, no "unabridged" title should have a single word omitted, but as a purist, I wouldn't accept a full-cast recording anyway, because the actors have too much influence over interpretation of tone. This is one of the reasons I love author-read material, though most authors make *very* poor readers (Scott Sigler being an exception.)

Also, I, too, was bothered by the treatment that Quicksilver received, though I never read the original, so perhaps the omission is justified, provided it doesn't claim to be unabridged (I try to avoid abridged titles, but I might have bought this one before I realized that it was.) There are some portions of some books that, while I'll read the book over and over, I will skip certain sections because I can't bear to slog through them another time. (Atlas Shrugged is the prime example.)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

It's also possible that the dialogue tags are there, but I'm not noticing them. I'll try and pay closer attention.

I've read quite a few of Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series in audiobook format. I don't have the specific production/edition info handy at work, but these tended to have one man and one woman narrator - if the chapter was about Alvin the man would read it, and if the chapter was about Penny the woman would read it. Sometimes when a chapter, especially a climactic one, featured both, the two narrators would take turns reading the text, but they did maintain the dialogue tags, which felt a bit awkward to me, but remained true to the text.

Since I bought Quicksilver through Audible, I lodged a complaint and they refunded my credits. That book was just impossible for me to read in the abridged audiobook format. There has only been one other book that I found the recording to be impossible to finish: the Libravox recording of Frankenstein, where the reader for the middle third apparently had dyslexia. I also did not finish the Libravox recording of Moby Dick, but that was not the fault of the recording; even in audiobook format it was too boring to finish.

FWIW I've read both Snowcrash and Ananthem in audiobook format. The Snowcrash edition I read was on cassette tapes and I didn't even realize was abridged until I read the print version. The abridged version selectively abridged the mysticism of the book, making it flow very well, but losing an important aspect of the original novel. Anathem from Audible was unabridged, and embellished the original work with polyphonic chants at the start of each chapter, which I greatly enjoyed. I read it twice, partially due to the complexity of the work.