If you’ve ever wondered what happens when two immortal, grumpy space-robots spend 10,000 years pulling increasingly elaborate pranks on each other, you need to listen to the audiobook of The Infinite and the Divine . Written by Robert Rath and narrated by Richard Reed Warhammer 40,000 novel
Reed gives Trazyn a voice that is patrician, dry, and endlessly amused. Imagine a British museum curator who has stolen the British Museum. His tone is light, almost conversational, with a rising inflection at the end of his clever observations. When Trazyn steals a priceless artifact, Reed sounds delighted . When Trazyn is outsmarted, Reed injects a petulant, almost childish huff. Crucially, there is no robotic monotone. Reed understands that Trazyn is the most human of the Necrons—he loves art, history, and theater. His voice is the sound of a god who has become a tourist.
It has been described as The Odd Couple meets Waiting for Godot by way of Terminator . It is a masterpiece of tone, balancing cosmic horror with slapstick comedy. infinite and the divine audiobook
The story follows two of the Necron race’s most iconic and eccentric figures:
The audiobook runs approximately 13 hours and 30 minutes. That is a significant investment. However, Reed’s performance is so engaging that the time flies. The book is structured like a series of interconnected vignettes (each century or millennium a new “chapter” in the feud). Reed treats each vignette like an episode of a serial. He changes his energy at each time jump. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when two
While the novel is excellent, the transforms the experience. Here’s why.
For an audiobook, this is a nightmare. How do you make a listener care about two beings who have no facial expressions, no breath, no heartbeat? How do you convey sarcasm from a metal skull? How do you make a time-loop exciting when the character feels no fear of death? His tone is light, almost conversational, with a
When a Necron warrior speaks, there is a distinct, metallic resonance—a clank of sprockets and a hum of power cells. The background scores swell with choral chants and electronic synthesizers, evoking the feeling of a civilization that is millions of years old, sleeping beneath the sand.
Since its release, the has garnered near-universal praise. On Audible, it holds a 4.8/5 star rating from over 10,000 global reviews. Common phrases in reviews include: “Did not expect to laugh this hard,” “Richard Reed IS Trazyn,” and “Best Warhammer audiobook I’ve ever heard.”
To convince you further, here are three moments that only work perfectly in audio: