Comments on: Dune

By: Harper's Notes

Harper's Notes — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 14:43:36 +0000

Dune didn’t really come alive for me until I read Timothy P. O’Reilly’s book on Frank Herbert. The combination of those two books together is a whole different read. As I recall, Tim was cum laude Harvard in Classics, knew Frank Herbert through the linguistics work of Senator Hayakawa (Hawaii), and wrote the book as something of a side project before getting into software manual publishing. The book is written in the style of criticism of classical literature, which is vastly different (and much preferred by me) from what has come to be the style in other academic departments. It’s free online. http://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/ ..

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 04:01:34 +0000

Candide III Dread Necroposter: "Niven's old stories were much better." Well, yes. But Kzinti feminists aren't retards who caterwaul about Kzintispreading and the odd dongle joke. You can respect them, like Dean Ing's Cathouse only better. And I don't think the "Dinosaurs vs. Kzinti" fight scenes were ripped off from Dune. The black man isn't an Affirmative Action hire blazing his saddle over "Where de White Womens At?" either. Lot more fight scenes than sex scenes, and more explicit. Niven's old stuff was wonderful. Of his new stuff I liked Shipstar's second half and The Goliath Stone better, but Destiny's Forge is still pretty good.

By: Candide III

Candide III — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:12:29 +0000

To necropost in answer to Bruce's recommendation of Destiny's Forge, I tried it and thought it was fairly generic with various pozzed twists: obligatory Black and military female leads (plus the female is white so miscegenation), Kzin feminism, explicit sex scenes and so on. Too many details are obviously ripped off from Dune, but the depth is not there. On top of that, the book is too big by half at least. Niven's old stories were much better.

By: Spandrell

Spandrell — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 04:15:14 +0000

Come on, the point of Dune is more fantasy than sci-fi, but that’s the beauty of it. Leto’s grandson becomes a worm. How awesome is that.

And didn’t someone $#@! his sister?

By: Guy

Guy — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:38:25 +0000

In the U.S., the name “Chilton” is synonymous with “car repair” — at least in the Northern Wisconsin branches.

By: Anomaly UK

Anomaly UK — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 23:12:17 +0000

Re Banks & Cherryh: No, in both cases they’re more focused works. There can be a big universe in the background — in Banks’s case described in the Culture books, but it is background, not part of the story.

What they have in common with Dune is not its scope, but the cross-over of heroic fantasy with space travel. In both of them, though, it’s high-tech visitors to low-tech environments.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 15:05:39 +0000

Cute, Buckethead. For the audience at home, the Chilton Company was a publisher of trade magazines and manuals that somehow ended up publishing Dune after no other publisher would pick it up — even after it did well in serial form. I just learned that Chilton also published The Witches of Karres (1966) by James H. Schmitz, which was also nominated for a Hugo — so maybe Dune isn't the best novel they ever published!

By: Buckethead

Buckethead — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:46:55 +0000

How dare you criticize Dune? It is the best novel that Chiltons ever published.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:31:05 +0000

Speaking of The Orange Catholic Bible, I suspect that's an element that turned me off in my "enlightened" youth, but which seems rather more plausible now.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:20:42 +0000

I actually haven't read any Banks or Cherryh. Do Inversions and Gate of Ivrel each have a Herbert-style big-picture vision with more convincing details?