Ray asked Charles Stross:

Greetings. just tried listening to Annihilation Score on Audible had to give up by chapter3 given the atrocious to my ear reading. Definitely does not do the book justice. If you agree on listening Any chance you could "encourage" them to reissue with Jack Hawkins reading who does an excellent job with your characters. I know it's been done before with other books from other authors. Big ask I know?

Charles Stross Short answer: nope.

Longer answer: As the narrator of that novel is female, it was decided to use a female narrator for the audiobook as well; Jack Hawkins is, regrettably, not female.

Also, to be blunt, you're the only reader (listener?) so far to complain about the US audiobook edition of Annihilation Score. Recording an audiobook edition is quite expensive — you're paying union rates for roughly 40-50 hours of voice actor time and 20-40 hours of sound studio engineer time, which comes to some thousands of dollars. A re-recording simply won't happen for any non-bestseller book in the absence of some overriding external factor, such as a TV/movie adaptation (and probably not even then).

You do have one option, though. Little, Brown, the British publisher of the Laundry Files, recorded their own audiobook editions using different voice actors. As I'm not an audiobook user myself I can't advise, but you might be able to get hold of a UK audiobook copy?

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