James Nicoll Reviews

Eboni J. Dunbar’s 2019 ​“The Translator” is a science fiction story, presented in both text and audio by Drabblecast. The narrator is Norm Sherman.

Humanity! Paragons of destiny, clearly fated to rule a trembling universe. Bit of a downer for the primates to discover that they are technologically inferior to the Tadashi, their galactic neighbors.

Newly commissioned Corporal Robbie Elms’ first assignment is as staffer for the impending negotiations between General Dellum and the Tadashi. Will these go any better than previous negotiations?

The Tadashi communicate in ways utterly unlike humans. For a Tadashi to negotiate, it requires a translator. Each Tadashi requires its own translator. In the case of envoy Chiroshai Omak, that translator is Captain Sarai Dogo.

General Dellum’s task is to obtain access to improved star drives from the Tadashi. As Elms’ interactions with Dellum reveal, he is not well suited to command. Nor is Dellum an adept negotiator, a lack for which he tries to compensate with hostility, xenophobia, and bombast.

How has Dellum ended up in this position of importance? In part because when Dogo was still working for humans, she did not take the opportunity to spike Dellum’s career. Now Dogo finds herself across a table with the manifestly unqualified Dellum, with Elms as witness.

~oOo~

I will never stop being upset that my incessant complaints about inept HR procedures in SF have been comprehensively undermined by the events of the last eight years. How can I moan about a complete dingus being put in charge of important negotiations when a US presidential candidate wandered around on a stage in silence for a quarter hour because apparently nobody on his team knows where the mics are kept or how to swap in live batteries?

We don’t get a detailed look backstage at the human civilization in this story, but what’s shown is enough to suggest that there’s no good reason for the Tadashi to provide humans with zippy fast space drives and many good reasons not to do so. Providing humans with access to more of the galaxy would only allow them to be annoying on a larger scale.

This review was an experiment. For various reasons, my time is going to be in short supply for the next week. A fair amount of commuting is involved and since I like to listen to radio plays on the bus, I thought I’d experiment with a narrated story.

Norm Sherman’s narration is straightforward and his diction is clear, which meant that I wasted no time rewinding to relisten to various passages. This is an issue I’ve had with other narrated works due to the impaired hearing thing. For reasons I cannot understand, I enjoy full-cast audio adaptations, but Mind Webs¹ aside, narrated text just does not do it for me. As well, listening to narrated works is frustratingly slow². There’s nothing technically wrong with this performance, it’s just not my thing.

I know from the sales of audiobooks that other people differ from me in this matter. I have good news for them. The Drabblecast has almost 500 episodes available; a glance at the list suggests that it covers a very wide range of stories.

The Translator is available here, in audio and in print.

1: Mind Webs was a WHA radio show narrated primarily by the late Michael Hansen.

2: Ask me how I feel about technical documentation that would take up three or four paragraphs of text being available only rambling, inaudible YouTube videos.