★★★★★ Apologies for this weird review

Count Zero

William Gibson, Reinhard Heinz (translator), Peter Robert (translator), Mark Bremer (narrator)

Apologies for this weird review

OK, so this was strange. I wanted an audiobook. I had just listened to and enjoyed the Neuromancer audiobook, which was very good. So, naturally, I wanted to continue. Here's the strange thing. The English language Count Zero audiobook is not available for sale in North America from any source that I could find. The Mona Lisa Overdrive audiobook is similarly unavailable in English. These exist and used to be for sale, but no longer, apparently. Even stranger, German translations of both can be purchased in America. So I decided to try that. even though (1) William Gibson wrote Count Zero in English, (2) my native language is English, and (3) I have not had a conversation in German in 40 years. I have kept up my Deutsch reading skills, but listening is hard and speaking is essentially impossible.

So, it worked out reasonably well. I have read Count Zero half a dozen times, so I always knew what was going on. Also, after the first few chapters I reduced the playback speed to 0.7x -- that helped a lot. I ended up being able to follow it quite well. However, I don't think I will listen to Mona Lisa Overdrive in German.

It ended up being more of a German lesson for me than a science fiction story. It's a good translation, I think. Some of the word choices were surprising to me and evocative. For instance, "Hired Man" was translated as "Mietling", and "kill" was translated not as "töten", which is the usual choice, but most often as "kaltmachen", an evocative slang choice that worked really well, especially for someone like me who had never heard it used that way. For those who don't know Deutsch, "kaltmachen" literally means "make cold" (google translate translates it as "chill"), but in context it was very obvious what it meant.

I was also a little surprised that the credits say it is "Aus dem Amerikanischen von Reinhard Heinz und Peter Robert". Americans speak, and Gibson writes, English. Is it common for German translators to identify the language of books written by North American authors authors as Amerikanisch? Because, if so, that's somewhere between weird and quite wrong.

Overall, I think it was a good translation, well read, but I am not really competent to judge.

Count Zero on Amazon

Goodreads review

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