A few weeks ago I was in the checkout line at Barnes & Noble and there was a kid in front of me with a copy of Dune. "I dunno, I guess it's some kind of '60s stuff," he said to a friend, who shrugged back.
This bit deeply into my boomer soul, so I decided to reread it for the fifth or sixth time. It's still pretty good! Then I decided to finally read the next two books in the series. I had never been able to get past the first dozen pages of Dune Messiah, but this time I had no trouble. Then I slogged through Children of Dune, which took forever.
My take: Dune Messiah makes the obvious point that if you know the future perfectly then you have no free will. Uh huh. As for Children of Dune, I don't know. I suppose it had a point, but it escaped me entirely, buried as it was beneath an impenetrable plot and tens of thousands of words of pseudo-profound dialogue. What were these people all talking about?
Sadly, the upshot of the whole thing is that I now think more poorly of the original Dune than I used to. Somehow, knowing how the culture of Arrakis and the Fremen—so stimulating in Dune!—is going to deteriorate into, um, generic '60s blather ruins even the best parts of Dune.
Oh well.
That makes me feel much better as I've never been able to read much of Dune at all, barely managing the first couple of chapters.
Ender's Game is the same way. After the first book, you want more, so you read the second book. After that, getting into the rest is a waste of time.
Same thing with The Matrix movies!
Ditto on Ender's and Dune. I'd call it quits after the first two Dune books. I have read the whole hexology, and couldn't see much point in books 4-6.
On the other hand, the first eight (8!) books of the Expanse series have been excellent, and the final volume, completing the story, will be out in November. Maybe Mr Drum ought to be reading that (if he hasn't already).
I'm exactly the opposite on the Ender series. The only excuse for Ender's Game is that it sets up Speaker for the Dead, which is brilliant.. Ender's Game also not as bad at the original novella length. The third and fourth books aren't bad so much as unnecessary.
There are trilogies (or series) that work and those that don't. The former, IMO, tend to be the ones that were conceived and sometimes written as a unified whole, like LOTR or the original Foundation novels of Asimov's, as opposed to cases where the first book was a hit and the author and publisher decided to cash in by writing more books.
The trick to these series is to when to quit. Somehow Drum had it right, then blew it.
'no'?
no
know
used an edit tag I thought didn't do anything and would just show up and it went away.
I was advised not to read anything beyond Dune Messiah, and I didn't. I guess it was good advice! And I never read more than the first of the Ender books. Too much else to read - I don't like the habit of science fiction writers of publishing long series. Two or three books is OK (Foundation, for example), but anything beyond that makes me wonder if I should even bother with the first.
The Foundation series ended up being seven books, and it gets tied in to all of the other novels Asimov wrote.
Loved how the robot from caves of steel ( set around today) is an important character
I actually read Dune Messiah first-- and for that matter after reading The Hobbit I read The Two Towers before Fellowship. The later Dune books were classic potboilers, and as Kevin said they tended to be pseudo-profound, though there was some of that in Dune itself too.
A disconnected series set in the same milieu but not telling a single coherent story, but rather different stories, can be OK, with some books better than others. As an example of this, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels.
Escaping the End of Humanity by transforming Humanity isn't fascinating?
It *could* be fascinating, or it could be boring as hell. It depends on whether the writer has a) enough interesting ideas on the subject to fill a novel and b) the clarity of thought and writing chops to express those ideas coherently.
The problem with books like Dune is that if you sustain b) throughout the series, it makes it very apparent when your supply of a) runs out.
À chacun ses goûts.
(Corollary: The writer can only cover for the loss of a) by sacrificing b) as well, whereupon the book degenerates into mush.)
Honestly the series is better as a summary becauae the ideas are interesting. I don't even mind the cash cow sequels by the kid in terms of ideas.
Yeah, the origin story novels were interesting in the sense they provided some context and that's about it.
Dune was a better book than Frank Herbert was a writer, but I think that was mostly due to Mohammad whose life it is. I didn't like anything else he wrote. Dune Messiah was stupid and half way through Children of Dune, it was time to get off the dune buggy. I typically don't read half a book but it was truly bad.
Well. Wait till you read one of the sequels his kid wrote.
Yeah. I bought a bunch of them via the SF Book Club back in the day, all hopped up on a presentation by one of the "prequel's" authors at the local Con -- and I think I ended up giving them all away.
Sadly, I can relate to a lot of this story. However, I read much further into the Dune series. How far? I can't remember, but I did get past the initial three books. And my own experience was that they become increasingly incomprehensible. There's always a lot to keep up with, right from the start. But, rather than acclimating to the "world" of Dune through subsequent books, my experience was that the story somehow manages to get even more obscure as it progresses. By book number whatever, I finally reached a point where I could no longer follow or understand anything going on. The endless references to countless different planets, species, cults, religions, factions, characters, and technologies require some kind of Masters degree to keep up with. Basically: it lost me. But, hey, I'll check out the movie version later this year anyway. Why not?
When Herbert brought in The Jews, I realized he'd really jumped the shark.
Dune was great. The rest of the books? Even successful authors have to pay the bills. Here's a shout out to Herbert's home town, Tacoma, which took a heap of arsenic contaminated smelter slag and turned into, what else?, Dune Park!
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x54905319fe25f8bd%3A0x2a0f8148bd460955!3m1!7e115!4shttps%3A%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOEaD5LKqJoNPIKMTx3CSY0tpxCuMM3q2R3bzZ7%3Dw213-h160-k-no!5sdune%20park%20tacoma%20-%20Google%20Search!15sCgIgAQ&imagekey=!1e10!2sAF1QipOEaD5LKqJoNPIKMTx3CSY0tpxCuMM3q2R3bzZ7&hl=en&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwi9qZCp6b7yAhWPFVkFHYozCFsQoiowKHoECHoQAw
Cool!
"My take: Dune Messiah makes the obvious point that if you know the future perfectly then you have no free will."
How could you ever know anything perfectly?
Does "knowing" the future imply that you can't change it? And if you could change it wouldn't that give you a kind of vertigo? Every small change on your part would telescope out to radically different futures appearing in your mind.
Reminds me of Griffin in MIB 3.
No. Paul Atreides learns that he cannot change anything.
Remember, in the Western Tradition, EVERY TIME the discussion of Free Will comes up, it is ultimately grounded in Predestination. That's what the argument is about, Augustine channeled through Calvin, even by people who don't think they are Calvinists.
If that argument does not interest you, then that's why so much of what you read about "Free Will" (not just fiction, also even much of the philosophy and trying-to-edge-up-to-science stuff) seems like content-free rambling. The discussions are all grounded in a set of axioms (so deep many of the participants don't even realize they are there) about god, the bible, reason vs faith, etc etc; and if you don't buy into those axioms then what's derived from them, even the stuff you'd expect to be immune like the science-adjacent stuff, seems like just so much babble (because it is! it's ultimately about trying to reconcile axiom X with axiom !X)
My experience on the dune novels is close to kevin except I thought maybe the 3rd book was a slightly better read than the 2nd ( although might have been that I was just more disappointed in the 2nd after the first ). Why I even read the third after the second is just that I am stubborn.
For some reason, I do not feel like rereading my beloved Tolkien maybe because the fact that the movies were , for once, decently loyal to the books spoils it.
I am now in a situation with some medical issues and cannot do much and am going back and rereading a lot of old treasured books that I saved from my youth. Especially science fiction series. Interesting experience to see how your memory fits with how it reads now.
One I did was fortschen's lost regiment series ( except I cannot find where I put the frigging last book) and still readable. But when you read them back to back they can be overwhelming depressing.
Rereading the jerry pournelle janisarries series which just came out with a new book after 20 years of ending on a cliffhanger ( the new book does not resolve it).
Plan to do Philip Jose farmer's riverworld series next and looking forward to that.
Now coynedj mentions Asimov's foundation so that goes on the list. I miss Asimov and Jerry pournelle ( who I met).
Has anyone read pournelles shared world Warworld books re world of haven? Reread those including final one I missed before and the final ending was a shock. Never seen that before although realistic. Spoiler- the bad guys win and maybe it was for the best.
As to prode, Kevin's comment on pseudo profound dialog is so spot on.
What is another problem I find today is too much unnecessary detail. If you have read webber safehold series, good writing can sometimes bring me to tears. And I love detailed world building with lots of maps. But do you have to describe in detail the color and shape of every rivet on a ship? When you are at like 8 books in a series and each is 800 pages of small text, I will not be rereading them.
I liked the third one too better than the second. Leto's transformation scene is pretty wild stuff!
Personally, I greatly preferred Larry Niven to Jerry Pournelle, although the two collaborated a fair bit. I like your idea of re-reading ancient series!
They not only collaborated, they were best friends. When I met pournelle, it was with niven too and it was touching how they interacted. It was at a b&n book signing and I was the only one there interested so they spent a half hour talking to me. Really nice guys.
I like niven a lot too. The ringworld books are on my rereading list. But different style . Pournelle had some complex idea but a direct writing style- very easy read. Niven's writing was somewhat denser - not as easy to read but more complex.
And I think their collaborations were better than either of them alone. They complimented each other.
'Over time, Pournelle grew to be more Pournelle. So did Niven.' I don't know about Pournelle as much as I do Niven, but the latter's sex and racial politics are absolutely hateful. There's a reason why he made the females of one alien species non-sentient.
"For some reason, I do not feel like rereading my beloved Tolkien maybe because the fact that the movies were , for once, decently loyal to the books spoils it."
Hard disagree. Oh, Jackson got the overall outline of the plot mostly right But that is the least of it. Lots of readers of LotR think it is a good adventure story and world building, but also the writing drags and wish Tolkien would get on with it: What's up with all that poetry, and Tom Bombadil WTF? These people think the Jackson films are an upgrade. They also are missing why LotR is so much better than the imitations. (Terry Brooks, anyone?)
I went through my re-reading old favorites a few years ago: Heinlein, Niven, Asimov, and so forth. I found nearly all of them unreadable. Heinlein in particular has characters we clearly are supposed to admire but who are narcissistic jerks: the sort of person I actively avoid. I hesitated about rereading Tolkien out of fear of ruining the memory. It holds up entirely. It is even better than I remembered.
Tolkien should have had a Nobel Prize.
I was not trying to say that the lotr movies were in any way an improvement on the books . Not even close. No movie can possibly adapt that rich of a book in a manner that really does it full justice. You just cannot pack enough of the ideas and details in that medium. And your own imagination creating the world is better for that story.
But, for the medium they had to work with, I have to say I think they did about as good a job as possible. I went in expecting to be really disappointed as I always am with science fiction movies and I wasn't.
Far far better than the normal movie adaption of science fiction which is horrible campy dreck.
And a rare example of a big budget for a fantasy or science fiction novel where the big budget made it better. Usually the best science fiction movies are the low budget ones.
Is there even one example of a science fiction or fantasy movie better than the book?
I think with 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie is a bit better than the book although a special case since they were supposed to come out at the same time. With the sequel, 2010 is close to the book.
That film seems astonishingly fresh and undated more than a half century after it was made. The word "genius" gets tossed around a lot, but Kubrick was the real deal.
They also are missing why LotR is so much better than the imitations. (Terry Brooks, anyone?)
Gotta say I admire the F out of Terry Brooks. Read the first (and only the first) of his books when I was like 13. And even at that age it struck me as an utterly ludicrous and lazy ripoff of LOTR. Talk about brazen. The dude basically found a way to become a multimillionaire through stone plagiarism. Brilliant!
I read the first three also. I think Carter was still president. Or maybe Reagan had just taken over. And yes, I was very young then. Zero desire to re-read any of them. "Lord of the Rings" I read multiple times before I hit my mid 30s, though, and that one I may take up again one of these days.
Sadly, the upshot of the whole thing is that I now think more poorly of the original Dune than I used to.
I feel that way about the vast bulk of the scifi I read as a teenager. Mainly it's because I now perceive that much of it is space opera: fantasy, in other words, that happens to be set in space, like Star Wars. Almost all if it ignores Special Relativity. Maybe this simply signifies the paucity of my imagination (as I get older) and ability to suspend belief, but if you want to do science fiction, make it science-y (aka "hard" science fiction). If I want fantasy fiction I'd rather they openly, honestly write it as such (eg Tolkien, Martin). No silly backstory, please, linking your work with our present time and cosmos; unless the fundamental laws of nature change, it's just silliness.
I see that Kevin neglects to mention that Dune is considered one of the great masterpieces of speculative fiction.... I've also read it 5-6 times (long ago). Hopefully, it is finally getting the film treatment that it deserves.
I've read not only the original trilogy, but subsequent sequels, spin-off trilogies from his son, etc. While nothing rises to the height of Dune (and some novels are a waste of time to read), the concepts and scope behind this franchise are epic, original, and staggering in implication. They have the scope and awesome themes of Foundation and the rich tapestry of characters and intrigue of Game of Thrones. Long before that series came out.
You cannot even understand the "Path" that Paul avoided taking, that his son had the courage to take, until his 3,0000+ year reign as God-Emperor.
If you have not read Dune, commit yourself to that long and worthwhile journey. it is certainly more accessible than LOTR, and nobody would say that is not worth the trip.
Sorry- accidental double-post.
To say that FTL travel has no place in "hard" (speculative) sci-fi, is to lack imagination and to avoid current theories of physics- and even a conceptual engine- for doing so. And the subjective nature of Reality that Herbert incorporates into his FTL navigation that science increasingly is finding it hard to deny.
The whole point of speculative fiction is to imagine (in a reasonable, sometimes even technical way, but not always) how the next disruptive tech is going to impact humankind.
Once you get 10,000 years out (as Dune does), yes, that speculation becomes increasingly fantastic and disconnected to what we understand, but that doesn't mean that Dune is fantasy. It is remarkable and imaginative world building.
thanks, that was a more coherent a reply than I had
FTL + SR = time travel. No way around this one, and if you want to write hard sf with faster-than-light plot points, you better incorporate it or explicitly explain why there isn't any.
Thank you.
Which is part of what makes Joe Holdeman's "The Forever War' such a great read, even if it is just nearFTL + SR.
To say that FTL travel has no place in "hard" (speculative) sci-fi, is to lack imagination
That's not what I wrote. FTL travel doesn't render something "soft" sci-fi. What does that is ignoring (or failing to explain) the time dilation effects of Special Relativity, specifically, the non-simultaneity of time flow. Perhaps 10,000 years from now humans will indeed be able to travel thousands of light years as easily as you or I jet off to Australia or Europe (and, from their local perspective, the journey will be rapid because time slows down). But when they return they'll find the people they once knew are long dead. A civilization that advances in tandem through history across vast reaches of a galaxy (in the manner we experience here on in earth) isn't consistent with nature. And, if the writer doesn't offer a plausible explanation as to why their universe apparently differs from the one Einstein explained to us, it's, um, space opera.
Which is fine, different strokes and all that. A lot of people enjoy space opera. I'm just not one of them! If I want to read fantasy, I prefer dragons and wizards.
I'll make this reply quick and blunt (which is about what the comment deserves). I've been reading science fiction for about sixty years. If you are trying to define science fiction (by adding qualifiers like "hard" or "real") to exclude any story that includes FTL travel, you are going to have a very narrow, stilted--and IMO, just plain wrong--definition of the genre.
To be fully transparent, though, I majored in social sciences (history and political science), not physics. And I've rarely read anything more boring in SF than a real moonlighting scientist (which was very common a generation or two ago) droning on for pages taking a deep dive into how his (and they were always men) by-God-extrapolated-from-real-science fake technology worked.
to exclude any story that includes FTL travel, you are going to have a very narrow, stilted--and IMO, just plain wrong--definition of the genre.
I have no interest in "defining" a genre. It's all about what I enjoy or don't enjoy. Presumably you're the same. I prefer science fiction that doesn't ignore the laws of nature. Full stop. Zipping off to a distant star doesn't ignore the laws of nature (we don't currently have such technology, but there are plausible -- if far-fetched from our current perspective -- ways to make that happen).
What ignores the laws of nature is pretending that, when you return from your star voyage, the people you once knew will still be alive, or that time will have flowed for them in lockstep with your localized time. It can't/won't. Which renders the "galactic empire" scenarios fantasy much more than scifi. I happen to have enjoyed plenty of fantasy writing in my days, just not the variety set in space. But if you like that sort of thing, good on you. Different strokes.
I see that Kevin neglects to mention that Dune is considered one of the great masterpieces of speculative fiction.... I've also read it 5-6 times (long ago). Hopefully, it is finally getting the film treatment that it deserves.
I've read not only the original trilogy, but subsequent sequels, spin-off trilogies from his son, etc. While nothing rises to the height of Dune (and some novels are a waste of time to read), the concepts and scope behind this franchise are epic, original, and staggering in implication. They have the scope and awesome themes of Foundation and the rich tapestry of characters and intrigue of Game of Thrones. Long before that series came out.
You cannot even understand the "Path" that Paul avoided taking, that his son had the courage to take, until his 3,0000+ year reign as God-Emperor.
If you have not read Dune, commit yourself to that long and worthwhile journey. it is certainly more accessible than LOTR, and nobody would say that is not worth the trip.
My experience jibes with Kevins more or less exactly. I did dip a few pages into the 4th one, name now escapes me, but found it too self=refluxive to persist with.
What I'm often surprised by is, Dune isn't Herberts best work - Whipping Star / Dosadi Experiment laid out a quite different and fascinating universe, for instance.
I'd go with The Santaroga Barrier myself. But tastes vary 🙂
The original Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew are about my speed now. Not much sex (any?), little mass violence, and good beats evil every time.
See, it was better in simpler times, especially when you own a good set of blinders.
No sex in the Hardy Boys? Frank and Joe's relationship with Biff and Chet is totally gay! (We will discreetly pass over Frank and Joe themselves, since as brothers that would be weird.) What about Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, you ask? This was the 1920s. Frank and Joe needed cover girlfriends. I refuse to speculate what Callie and Iola did together, as that would be objectify them under the male gaze.
Don't get me started on Johnny Quest...
I quietly deplore the 21st c insistance on sexualizing EVERYTHING. And now, we apparently most homosexualize everything, too.
Good thing you never got to god emperor. It's unclear whether his homophobia was what informed his gender/sexuality politics in the books or whether the philosophy he espouses as Leto 2 led him to it as a logical conclusion. He also has some very weird ideas regarding Muslims.
It's a rare case where separating author from the work is difficult because much of it is so obviously an author tract. I'm not talking about canceling him, just that the books become even more tiresome later.
Thanks for the warning! Dune is (was?) on my re-read list and I was contemplating finally reading the sequels, too. My experience is that all the best series are *conceived* as series, so I'm not exactly surprised by your mini-review.
As for Fantasy vs. SF here in the comments, I think most of us appreciate the harder SF (a la "The Martian" by Weir) but don't require it. Arthur C. Clarke nailed it -- "Magic's just science that we don't understand yet."
Dune/Dune Messiah was originally meant to be one book then, when the word count became too high (for those primitive times), a duology. After the books commercial success, of course, Frank had to scramble for something to say, hence the inferior quality of later entrants into the series.
I have similar feelings about Boardwalk Empire, incidentally. The story would have been much more satisfying had the series ended with the death of James "Jimmy" Darmody in the last episode of season two. IMHO, of course.
I'd cavil with Kevin on his take that Dune II's main theme is prediction = predestiny, because there's a difference between the immutability of the timeline and "When it's time to butthead people are gonna butthead." Did the witches predict MacBeth's fate or did they cause it, if you get my drift.
The question of the compatibility of divine omniscience and human free will goes back at least to Boethius in the 6th century. His solution was that we have free will, but this is within time and space. God stands outside time and space and looks in, hence His omniscience. Or at least that's how I remember it from my undergrad days. I may have bolluxed it entirely.
The just-so stories I got back in the day as an undergrad was that 'free will' was a kludge to square an omnipotent, omniscient god with a loving, benevolent god: Why are persons damned to burn in Hell forever if their fate is precast? Not cool, God-man. God-man shuffles his feet a bit, mumbles 'free will' and exits stage left. Heh. That's like selling a gun to a man you know is going to shoot his wife and then -- Surprise! -- he shoots his wife with the gun you sold him twenty minutes earlier.
TL;DR: 'Free will' was an unsatisfactory answer to a meaningless question and isn't really considered much a thing these days. Y'all who are compatibilists or at least have some sympathy for that notion raise your hands. Yeah, I thought so.
Just stopping by to recommend N.K. Jemisin's "Broken Earth" series. Lively prose style, strong characters and a good story. More fantasy than SF. I'm old, and easily bored these days by SF/Fantasy "epics," but this one kept me up late reading.
I've got this on my shelf.
I loved the Inheritance Trilogy. I kind of bounced off Broken Earth. It felt like I was getting the exact same exposition several times over.
A favorite of Kevin's, if I remember correctly from a post some years ago.
I read "Dune" eons ago. It was a great read. I think I started the sequel and decided one was enough.
Started Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but bogged down. Supposed to be the greatest of all, but it didn't move me.
No mention so far of the Stephen R. Donaldson Thomas Covenant books: "Lord Foul's Bane," "The Illearth War," etc. For some reason I read all six. The first three were pretty good.
Recently read Ursula Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," which I liked.
LOTR is far superior to all of these, IMO. Also The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, and many other "Classics."
Because LOTR is written to be like a modern version of those classics.
Not every story has to deal with an indepth multidimensional examination of a person's character. There is a place for that too though.
I liked both trilogy one and trilogy two of Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books. The fact that the second trilogy had a second POV character from the "real" world gave it greater scope (also, the Sunbane made it something different from the usual Dark Lord Tries To Conquer The World story). He wrote a much later tetralogy to "finish" the Land's story-- and it was awful.
I read the Thomas Covenant books when I was in high school, and there are some interesting ideas; but as an adult I would never get past the first third of book one, and I would not recommend them to anybody. It's pretty damn hard to get past the protagonist raping a teenager. (In fairness to Donaldson, he does not excuse this or use it as a pretext for violent porn, he is clear that it is a despicable crime; but you still have to read three books from Covenant's point of view after seeing him do this. And I get where it was going with the symbolism, but... no, dude. Just no.)
Also, on a purely technical level, Donaldson's prose was too ambitious for his vocabulary. He was very fond of long words whose meaning and usage he did not quite grasp--I suspect he got them out of a thesaurus. If you are reading his books and you do know those words, you will keep barking your shins on sentences that do not mean what the author intended them to mean.
Indeed. If you're looking for sf with engaging wordplay and Christian motifs , I recommend Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series.
Stranger in a strange land is fairly unique. Hard to describe. Not sure I would call it a " good book" , certainly not an easy read and the writing does not flow well. But really a thinking book that will challenge your preconceptions. If you want a book to relax with and hate to ever have to have your biases questioned, do not read books like this. They take effort and challenge you intellectually in a way that can make you uncomfortable.
As compared to Dune which has a lot of pseudo profound crap. But this is really more super profound, so much so it is a chore to understand.
What struck me when first reading it was that I often picked my favorite authors and Heinlein was one of them. So I started it expecting to read a normal Heinlein and it was what the hell is this!
One very thoughtful henlein book that is an easier read is starship troopers . Although that will also tend to challenge you politically especially if you are liberal. But I was excited to hear they were making a movie as even the movie industry had to do a serious science fiction movie adapting that book. And then I saw the movie. Oh my God.
Heh. My reaction was the opposite to yours. In my reading, "Stranger" was a heap of misogynistic cr** layered onto extreme libertarian cr**, with a side of crucifixion envy. But -- and now I need to re-read it, years later -- "Dune" (the Original Book -- portrayed an intriguing high tech feudalism which included competing "schools" of assorted mysticisms and heightened abilities, in which females were more than sex toys for the boys.
Yeah, it will be good to re-read Dune and see if my recollections measure up! I've recently finished watching the Sciffy network's 3-episode miniseries of the book, which blew away the 1984 movie travesty, and want to move on to their sequel series, "Children of Dune."
Stranger in a strange land is the sort of book you have to reread a few times to understand. But you do not want to as it is too much work and no fun.
But ,like I said, it challenges preconceptions and pushes some buttons and it did yours. If you do not enjoy having your beliefs questioned, it will just piss you off.
Maybe I will try to find that Scifi channel dune version. Yes the 1984 movie was bad. I sort of gave up on the Sci fi channel when it switched from some science fiction to " sci fi".
This was the one where Robert said, "I'm too big for you to edit now, HA HA HA!"
No, no you weren't. And you're not remembered fondly for this you aren't the boss of me approach to writing.
My understanding is that is exactly the case.
Typical Heinlien: "What sort of plot twist can I use to have everyone take off their clothes?"
You know who reads Heinlein? MAGA types. That he was so popular back in the day might have been taken as a clue as to how prevalent that type is. Don't forget that Heinlein never accepted relativity ... because he knew better, damn it. Also, Heinlein was reputed to be quite unpleasant, taking any disagreement with his opinions quite personally. Sound familiar?
I can't think of any LeGuin books that aren't worth reading.
The Earthsea Trilogy is one of my favorite series, up the with LOTR.
I have very fond memories of that as a teen. She was really a wonderful writer.
Lathe of Heaven was great, as was the PBS TV production of it. Haber tells Or to dream of peace on earth, after which the Russians and the Americans are fighting a war on the moon. Haber tells Or to dream of the Americans and Russians not fighting each other, so now they are both fighting aliens on the moon. Haber tells Or to dream of peace with the aliens, at which point the aliens move to earth and open book stores. And on it goes, with Or and Haber avoiding the ultimate truth.
I think it is hyperbole to state that lotr is "far superior " to those classics. But I agree that it is a true "classic " that at the very least is comparable to them. Too many literature snobs automatically dismiss things like lotr just because they were written in modern times.
Not really right to compare something like odyssey to lotr as they are just not the same type of literature. For the time and it's purpose Homer wrote some amazing things.
For the inferno, a fairer comparison, although inferno is more comparable to science fiction than fantasy. Given the constraints of the society Dante had to write in, the inferno is an amazing work.
Have you noted how often science fiction writers creating a future world include lotr as a sort of " classic from old days" that is now integrally part of that future culture as a society defining myth?
More than any other current books.
I'm one of those people that likes the science in my science fiction to be right. Obviously, in order to be science fiction it has to assume a certain amount of "magic" technology, the explanation for which involves a lot of handwaving, and that's OK. However, where you're not dealing with magic technology the story should follow known science. Dune doesn't.
The physics of sandworms just doesn't work, for reasons I trust are obvious enough not to require explanation. More subtly, stillsuits violate the laws of thermodynamics. A stillsuit wearer is supposedly cooled by evaporation of sweat in the usual fashion, but the suit then recovers the water vapor and condenses it, with the whole process powered by the wearer. Unfortunately, condensing the water vapor from the wearer's evaporated sweat is going to give back all the heat that was absorbed by evaporation of that water, plus some since the evaporation is not going to happen as a thermodynamically reversible process. In short, a stillsuit wearer will rapidly bake.
Those sorts of things are why I found Dune annoying and won't reread it.
I can tolerate a suspension of disbelief for the story. But want the details of that pretend world to make sense and it all fit consistently.
So I am the type who can read superman and say " OK, what if he could have all these powers just because he came from krypton " and still enjoy the story accepting that. But then be annoyed that why is it that so many people he meets have LL names as that is too big a coincidence.
Dune asks you to suspend disbelief for many things but it fails to really even make sense and fit together within the world it creates.
Real hard sf tries to stick within known parameters of existing science and just extrapolate.
Others invent some hypothetical new theories i.e. Asimov's science is like magic idea. So you can deal with space travel and relatively by just saying they discover Einstein was not quite correct. But stay within the bounds of the world that creates.
Some also are called fantasy like lord of the rings and do invent a whole new science and world that has totally different rules . But stays rigorously consistent in minute detail to those rules.
And things like dune are more about the story making philosophical points so staying consistent to science or any sort of logical structure is secondary. So I do not consider dune even in the category of science fiction.
Stillsuit hand-waivery is small potatoes compared to Herbert's setting up a galactic empire where the various worlds experience simultaneous time flow.
Same. Barely fought my thru #3. Gave up quickly after that. Dune is still brilliant, though, for me.
I've read Dune several times. It's not bad.
I prefer Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Time travel stories wherein the protagonist (or for that matter, the antagonist) try to change the past (or for that matter, the future) can be engaging as either light entertainment or an intellectual exercise. But in reality? That's a really dick thing to try to do. I call it a causal disregard for the lives of other people, sometimes billions of them.
This excludes predicting the future in the usual sense of course, which is more on the order of extrapolation.
I can enjoy alternate history like the 1632 series by weber.
But I still keep wondering why nobody sees the obvious implications of a whole city going back in time to their own past.
If it creates an alternate reality, then every person in that past history did not exist and were created with the memories of other people fresh. Or maybe somehow two people are spun off from one. What does that say about your own identity.
Or other possibilities but all should be shaking their concepts of sentience and what they are. But nobody cares.
Or star trek and their transporters that beam your atoms and then rebuild you at the other end. And can even mess up and make an extra flawed copy. Which clearly means you are always killed and a duplicate you is made. But they all keep getting in the transporter.
Crew members had to use the transporter. Special effects using the shuttle craft were just too expensive back in the sixties.
Has any sci-fi or space opera writer ever grappled with the fact the whole solar system is moving through space all the time through ( with more than one factors of motion, IIRC).
Everyone has their time machine set a future or past date, and then assumes that the time machine will of course pop up in the same place on earth from where it launched --- with even one day's passage the earth would be (1/365th of a 186 million mile diameter times pi away) from yesterday, with longer time jumps the earth would have moved billions of miles from its actual location in space at the previous time.
All the time.
Just read a story in Analog where that was the whole point. Not a great story but guy invents a time machine against opposition of wife and no support. And it works. But when he uses it to go back a short way in time, he ends up stuck in space where the earth used to be. Saw that coming a mile away as the reader but somehow this genius scientist never thought of that. Just dumb story. I am sort of giving up on Analog.
Usual explanation when it is dealt with is the time machine is sort of locked into a place on earth gravitationally or something.
But actually your criticism is bad science itself? Everything is relative per Einstein theory. There is no " actual location in space " where earth used to be. It sounds like you are determining it in relation to Sol but why is that more preferred than in relation to other matter making up Terra?
My published work on my scientific and spiritual beliefs has been up on the intertubes for ten years now, and for the spiritual part I only published the more socially acceptable portions of what I actually go with.
I am assuming a universal point of view, whatever shape our future scientists/philosophers/spiritualists may find the universe to have been in, at any particular moment, is the shape of the universal space at that moment, and so there should, unless I'm mistaken somehow, be a "relative" location within the universal shape.
I've read Hawking's book on time, I won't pretend I understood the math. So I didn't get much out of it --- but the idea that not even he and the other best know what's going on with that stuff, noboby has ever come close to explaining it, or seeing it waver in any fashion from its inexorable rush. I understand the GPS satellites have to have a correction for The Einstein Time Effect of moving so fast, but other than that, Good Luck for anybody trying to mess with, or control or affect in any way, that time stuff.
And now that I think of it, surely that universal shape is always changing, and accounting for the time effects of anything moving fast enough to have Einstein Time Effects.
I first read Dune well over fifty years ago (around age 14-15) and have probably reread it at least a half dozen times. (That's nothing; I first read LOTR maybe a year or two later and have reread it roughly annually since.) My last reading was within the last year. Unlike a lot of SF I loved at that age (including the Foundation series, I'm sorry to say), it holds up pretty well. (Though speaking of iconic '60s SF, Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which I've also reread in the past year, hold up even better. Just a spectacular novel.) I haven't read the Frank Herbert penned sequels in decades, though I read them all when first published. As I recall, even at the time my reaction was quite mixed.
BTW, if you value your sanity, stay away from the endless Dune prequels by Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin Anderson. They are perhaps the most abominably written SF ever. And I've read a a half dozen or so Star Wars novels. (Only one of those--Kenobi, about Obi-wan's early days of exile on Tatooine--was decent.) I've wondered what Brian brought to the table other than the legal rights and the unlikely claim that these books were based on Frank's outlines. I've read one or two non-Dune SF novels by Anderson and they were spectacularly awful in exactly the same style.
Speaking of hexalogies, how about Stephen King's Dark Tower series? Each was very different, some I liked some not so much but the ending made me want to throw the whole series down a hole somewhere. I was like, "That's it? That's what I spent so much time on this for?"
"Stephen King is a terrible writer. I can't believe I stayed up until 5 a.m. reading this trash."
86 comments I have not read but will say…I read ever science fiction or off beat thing I can I could not get past 50 pages of Dune. I started with Vonnegut and read constantly. Sone good stuff, mostly lousy stuff but Dume was other worldly painful.