Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

This was the first Audiobook I ever had on Tape. Nice bit of Nostalgia. Spock's parts are brilliant.

just like the film. so very good. George takai is a fantastic voice to have reading.

I had hoped it was the whole book by Vonda McIntyre. I love Star Trek and I love McIntyre's original works. But unfortunately, it is seriously abridged. There isn't much more there than the bare bones of the someone lacking story from the movie. It's not the most brilliant of the Star Trek movies, after all. The production and performance, however, we fantastic and well worth the listen. George Takei does a great job of evoking all of the different characters. The sound effects and music add a lot to the story and it's also nice to hear Leonard Nimoy doing little Spock monologues. I just wish they'd made it longer than the actual film, so that we could've gotten more of the back-story and more depth to the characters, which I'm sure McIntyre included in the book.

This audiobook is an abridgement of a novelisation of the 1986 film. The fact that it's been cut to approximately the same length as the film raises question marks, given the amount of information that a film can convey visually but a book - or an audiobook - has to spell out more explicitly. At times I felt like I'd got lost in the story, and certainly I'm not sure how intelligible the plot would be if you hadn't seen the film. One can quite clearly 'hear' where the abridger has removed sections, which is not the mark of a good abridgement.



Nonetheless, the story is a good one and doesn't suffer mortally from the abridgement. The reading - by George Takei - is a good one, though the distinctiveness of his own voice sometimes makes it confusing when other characters are speaking. The sound effects I found an annoying distraction, adding little and sometimes muffling the reading. The quality of the recording is also not perfect - I think it was originally recorded to cassette.



Overall, I enjoyed it for its nostalgia value, as bedtime listening, and because it was so reasonably priced, but I'm not sure I'd buy it again.

The first time I watched this movie, many years ago, I loved it. That is still the case. The time travel episodes/movies of Star Trek have always fascinated me, and the books are no different.

This book is remarkably similar to the movie, and is yet another great addition to my collection :-)