Upon reflection, I wonder if that particular audiobook publisher has rules about sticking to the provided text no matter what. I took a class in voice acting once, believe it or not, and that was one of the things the instructor mentioned can happen--sometimes the director/producer welcome input from the talent when something in the text doesn't make sense, but sometimes they really, really don't.

The thing is, all of the glaring errors I've spotted in the text so far (of which "the clam of peace" is the funniest, which is why I posted about it) read uncannnily like Optical Character Recognition errors. The Russian history course I took as an undergrad was largely taught from a book that was long out-of-print, which the professor got around by distributing PDFs of lengthy extracts from a scan of the book. Whoever did the scan mistakenly left Acrobat's crappy OCR on, which caused many... interesting... misinterpretations of the text. After a while the scan engine's habits started to become so familiar that I stopped even noticing the weirdness and just parsed what was meant rather than what was actually there in most cases.

Whether he voiced the weirdness inherent in such a thing because of reader trance or because the recording personnel (who you would think would have noticed it too) insisted on following the provided text exactly, I have no idea, but with that experience in the back of my head, I can't shake the suspicion that Griffin was working from a similarly janky scan of Decline and Fall.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.