My first solo Librivox project: Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper

Two months ago, I participated in an SFFAudio podcast discussion of Omnilingual, a novelette by H. Beam Piper that appeared in "Astounding Science Fiction" in February 1957. I greatly enjoyed reading and listening to the story, and talking about it with other science fiction fans. (The episode hasn't been released yet.)

There were two fine audio versions of it in the free Librivox catalogue, ably narrated by Phil Chenevert and by Mark Nelson. However, the story is unusual for its time in that the protagonist is a female scientist, and there is no romantic subplot. I thought it would be nice to offer the option of hearing a woman voicing this story.

The story has academic politics but no overt sexual politics. There are several references to "girl lieutenants" and the like, but honestly, I found the constant smoking references even more jarring:

As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a cigarette, her first since noon...

The important thing is that the story focuses on Dr. Martha Dane as a scientist. I love the archaeological/linguistic puzzle Martha sets herself against, and how things work out. As I put it in my own Librivox summary:

Helped by some of her teammates on the Mars exploration crew, and hindered by others, she struggles to decipher the meanings of the artifacts left by an extinct alien species. What possible frame of reference can humans and the long-gone Martians have in common? The answer is very satisfying ...

I've narrated a few chapters of a couple of books for group projects at Librivox, but this is my first solo project. I had been looking for something appropriate for a while, and this one seemed perfect.

After that choice, and learning how to set up a solo project (with help from Mr. Chenevert himself), the first thing I had to decide was how many sections to break it up into. I first set up the projects for four parts, but during the editing process, I decided to put it into five parts instead. I think they are nice, logical breaks in the story.

The second thing I had to decide was how to voice it, i.e. how much inflection to give the narration, and what voice acting to do for the dialogue. Some Librivox readers narrate with a rather flat affect, but I prefer the more expressive readings, and my natural style is to read with inflections. So that's how I narrated most of it, and I used my own voice for Martha.

Sachiko Koremitsu, the other female character with dialogue in the story (yes, Omnilingual meets the Bechdel Test), is constantly referred to as petite, delicate, with tiny hands. I gave her a higher-pitched intonation, and tried to speak smoothly and rather musically for her.

Selim von Ohlmhorst has the most dialogue of any male character. I've studied German and would have been willing to try that accent, but he's actually of Turco-Germanic descent, so I just gave the grand old man a deep, round-toned delivery.

Tony Lattimer, Martha's main detractor, also has a lot of dialogue. I tried to make him sound a little too smooth and charming, a bit self-important, with occasional snideness.

I made Col. Hubert Penrose rather brisk, not quite barking-impatient but a man who obviously values efficiency. The other men with scraps of dialogue basically blended together.

Finally, I skimmed the text again looking for words that might make me stumble, and deciding how to approach them. For instance, the word loess has several variant pronunciations (low-ess, less, luss), but it's originally from German (Löss) so I aimed for the o-umlaut sound. 

It took time to narrate it (my version totals about an hour and 48 minutes), and significantly more time to edit the audio files. Since it was my first solo project, I was a bit obsessive about editing, so it took roughly five times as long to polish it as it did to record it. Then I had to tweak it some more to fix some problems that the project's proof-listener, cadastra, caught. 

The recording didn't turn out perfectly -- there are a few points where I found problems and inserted words instead of re-narrating whole sections -- but I am pretty well satisfied with the final result. Anyway, cadastra said she really enjoyed listening.

If you want to hear it, it's here:

https://librivox.org/omnilingual-version-3-by-h-beam-piper/

Please enjoy! And if you want to suggest other public-domain works for me to narrate, especially with female protagonists and in the speculative fiction genres, feel free!