Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

I found this comment on this video review to Sandworms of Dune:

EmperorofFatalism

Well if the newer one are crap, then you might as well avoid the series altogether, since a story that ends with a clift hanger is not a propper story.

my answer:

cmsahe
That's not true! the cliffhanger is an invention of the writers (KJA/BH) so that you buy their books. Frank Herbert had as the central subject of the Dune series (since GEoD) the survival of mankind, and that's achieved when Duncan Idaho pilots the no-ship into the unknown, forever out of the grasp of the Bene Gesserit-Honored Matres and the SuperFaceDancers Marty & Daniel (the hacks made them Evil killing robots...) I interpret that you have not read the original Dune series by Frank Herbert.


EmperorofFatalism

Chapter house did end with a clift hanger, and the series would of been complete if he had not died. Because of that we will never know how the series ended. No ending, no story, no read, thus it is best to avoid the series altogether.

What a [EDITED BY THE ALMIGHTY MODERATOR]!!

About my opinion I might be mistaken, even the wikipedia entry to ChD mentions that the series ended in a cliffhanger. When did you first hear about the "cliffhanger"? I didn't interpret the finale as one when I read the book. Did you? Is it a marketing scheme by HLP? Of course Frank Herbert would have written a sequel, but he died and this is the end, it does not matter if you like it or not. Are some readers so blunt and thick headed that they need a complete explanation of a story since the Big Bang till the Big Crunch (or the cold dead by evaporation of all physical matter)

EmperorofFatalism stars in Reader Without a Clue.
I stopped after the first minute. I couldn't stand it.

But I did my duty, ranked the video zero, approved your comments, disapproved his. That's all the attention I'm willing to give this fan who is apparently "unburdened by an attachment to the originals" (aka, good taste for quality writing).

It does end almost like a cliffhanger... the reader learns that Marty & Daniel are manipulating certain organizations, appear to be advanced facedancers, and either want to capture or kill Duncan Idaho. Meanwhile Duncan and his crew "leave the known universe," if you will, and have no maps to guide them. Two faces of the enemy are revealed, Duncan has run away, and the ultimate fate of the Known Universe is left unknown due to the uneasy truce between the BG and the HM.

Frank Herbert would definitely have written another novel to at least close out this arc IMO. However, it does end like a "riding into the sunset" kind of way, if need be, could also act as a series end despite the "real" enemy only finally being revealed.

In anyways, CH:D's ending is still more satisfying than anything I've read from Pinky and the Brian.

Well, I think FH definitely intended to write more, as there are still fairly major plot threads left unresolved. So in that sense, CH:D ended on a cliffhanger.

But the argument that this somehow invalidates the original six novels, and that they should only be read in conjuction with the appalling Dune 7 novels is nonsense.

HBJ

"Clift hanger"?

Good lord, this country is doomed ...

Edit: ah, irony, you bitch: I had a misspelling, too. Damnit.

Eh. This was uploaded two years ago. It's not really worth getting into a Youtube discussion over.

But his literary analysis is pretty dumbed-down. It's a "beautiful" book and the story is about the "human experience" and "caring/loving". If that's really the theme of Sandworms how would KJA ever have gotten this through the publishers? (Oh yeah, money)

The conclusions he draws on the Enemy are annoying. Face Dancers aren't "intelligent" enough to be the Enemy, and FH would have "never introduced something we haven't experienced before." It's just terrible. (And his pronunciation is terrible )

Um ... check out page 4 of the comments.

Sorry, Carlos, but for me this is just too "been there, done that". The guy, Davesghola, isn't worth wasting your time on.

(Check out his main page there; dude's got some sorta Druid thang goin' on in some of those clips. )

Though that guy is a retard, nonetheless the series definitely ended on a cliffhanger. You don't have to say that the series is complete to reject the new crap.

SandChigger wrote:Um ... check out page 4 of the comments.

I'm assuming ArrakeenSandChigger is you, and you're referring to your Face Dancer comment? Yeah. He didn't get it. I don't see how anyone could have missed the point in Chapterhouse that the Face Dancers have begun to evolve. It was one of the main plot points.

Yep, that were me. I commented on a few of his other clips and came to the conclusion that he was (if not a retard, as Schu puts it then at least) a confirmed Pretard, so there wasn't much point in bothering.


Sorry, to me a "cliffhanger" would have been something like the book ending with the no-ship having fallen under the control of Marty and Daniel, or a fleet of the Enemy's ships appearing in the skies over Chapterhouse Planet.

Chapterhouse: Dune has an open ending. Sure, it could be followed by a sequel. But it need not be.

The no-ship and its passengers have reached a new, alternate universe or some far distant new corner of ours. Their adventure is just beginning, but they're no longer in any immediate danger from the Old Couple.

In the Old Empire, the BG and HM have been joined under Murbella and they'll have a rough time achieving a new balance, but at least the BG are no longer in danger of being overwhelmed by the HM. (In fact, it's just the opposite, since as HM train to become RMs and go through the Agony, they'll end up becoming BG. When the time of trial has passed, only the BG will remain.)

There remains the question of The Enemy, which most(?) of us think is Super Advanced New Face Dancers as represented by Marty and Daniel, but their ultimate intentions are unclear. Will they continue to pursue the HM now that the latter are assimilating into the BG? Do they intend to exterminate the human population of the Old Empire? Or will they maybe just decide to fook off somewhere on their own?

See what I mean? Where's the Pauline strapped screaming to the train tracks with the locomotive bearing down on her?

SandChigger wrote:Chapterhouse: Dune has an open ending. Sure, it could be followed by a sequel. But it need not be.

I was pretty satisfied with the Chapterhouse ending. As you said, the only loose end was Daniel and Marty's intentions.

But you can pretty much infer what was going to happen with everything else, and the ending is quite clear: all our eggs aren't in one basket, so we're just fine. The seeding of the sandworms just proved that point. That was really the true resolution of Chapterhouse (in my opinion). Everything else was just tidying up.

Remembering also FH's stated philosophy of letting, no, expecting his readers to use their imaginations makes it seem even more convincing to me that an open ending is what he intended when he wrote CH:D.

(And that's not changed even if it's true what Bobo has written in DoD and FH really was going through a copy of CH:D with a marker, highlighting things and making plans for a sequel before he took ill and passed.)

Yeah. Any sequel to "finish off" the series would be redundant. FH would only be telling you things you're able to infer yourself, or at least imagine.

I really don't feel any other book is necessary for the Dune series, though I was interested in reading this:

Willis McNelly wrote:I had proposed to FH that he and I collaborate on a prequel to the Dune saga called "Prequel to Dune: the Butlerian Jehad" or some similar title. FH and I had discussed writing it together and he agreed with my general plot outline, completed first chapter, and so on but his untimely death prevented us from continuing. He had been living in the LA area at the time and we often discussed it by phone, but I have no written notes from him about it, unfortunately The prequel would have followed in general terms the story as outlined in the DE - sketched in my notes - which I still have - and written in final published form by one of my colleagues at Cal State.

[http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan. ... put=gplain]

So unless I'm completely misinterpreting this, there's some possibly still-existent notes outlining a BJ novel FH agreed to out there. Which would be nice to have, in at least settling some canonicity disputes.

I guess it's not a cliffhanger in the sense of "watch the next episode to see how our hero gets out of this one", but I'm pretty sure it was meant to be continued, otherwise it's a really strange ending, especially that last chapter with Marty and Daniel, who we can't even be certain are the enemy the book focuses on (though there are certainly hints saying that they are).

I think that Dune, CoD and GEoD didn't need sequels, Frank just wanted to continue the series. DM is debatable, but certainly looked more like having a continuation than the aforementioned three. HoD was obviously in need of a sequel (especially considering C:D came only a year after this was finished), and I think C:D needs one too, it's certainly nowhere near as settled as after the three that I think don't need a sequel, and I think even more unsettled than DM.

Schu wrote:I guess it's not a cliffhanger in the sense of "watch the next episode to see how our hero gets out of this one", but I'm pretty sure it was meant to be continued, otherwise it's a really strange ending, especially that last chapter with Marty and Daniel, who we can't even be certain are the enemy the book focuses on (though there are certainly hints saying that they are).

I think that Dune, CoD and GEoD didn't need sequels, Frank just wanted to continue the series. DM is debatable, but certainly looked more like having a continuation than the aforementioned three. HoD was obviously in need of a sequel (especially considering C:D came only a year after this was finished), and I think C:D needs one too, it's certainly nowhere near as settled as after the three that I think don't need a sequel, and I think even more unsettled than DM.

C:D

oops!

C : D

Isn't Dune Revanant (fan fic) the better example of what to do with this 'cliffhanger'?

Jump to a far distant future see what that is and infer what has occurred over the previous period. I like that much better than the 'authorized' fan fic that was shoved down our throat.

Schu, I don't even really consider the Dune series a "series". In my opinion they're several stand-alone novels that are filled out and tied together through companion novels.

* Dune is obviously the first and main entry in the series, while Dune Messiah expands upon it and clarifies a lot of the themes expressed by Paul and his Jihad

* Children of Dune is the second novel in the series, which completes the main series. God-Emperor of Dune doesn't really do anything except clarify the Golden path, so it feels to me to be nothing more than a companion novel to Children

* Heretics and Chapterhouse are completely unnecessary to me, but I feel that they are the most powerful in the series (other than Dune itself). You can read them if you want, but God-Emperor was ending enough for me. They only provide further clarification on the series and are companion novels to everything that came before


This seems like an odd way to look at the Chronicles, but I don't think I can bring myself to look at them chronologically. I don't think Dune is so much about the characters as the ideas behind those characters. Let II was discarded pretty easily in God-Emperor, but what stayed with you were the ideas he was trying to drill into Siona and Duncan. To me, it's the ideas that stand out the most and every book has done nothing more than explore what FH originally set out to do.

Well that's an interesting way of looking at it, but it doesn't work for me.

I may be wrong but didn't F. Herbert see Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune as one grand story and IIRC is on record as stating so.

inhuien wrote:I may be wrong but didn't F. Herbert see Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune as one grand story and IIRC is on record as stating so.

I can recall that parts of DM were meant for Dune, and I can assume the same for CoD. That's one of the reasons I feel the Chronicles are really one several stand-alone novels with many companion books to clarify them. All great novels, but obviously they couldn't work by themselves like some series do.

SandChigger wrote:Chapterhouse: Dune has an open ending. Sure, it could be followed by a sequel. But it need not be.

Oh, you'd be amazed at all the people that despise "open endings" and can't distinguish them from a "cliffhanger". I must have had more arguments defending great films with open endings than any other topic about film in my life as a connoisseur of film. That's why I couldn't finish watching this video; the guy is indicative of so many people I've argued with about the virtue of a solid open ending. When I meet those people, they make me tired all over.

GamePlayer wrote:When I meet those people, they make me tired all over.

Have them watch the final episode of the Sopranos.

(which, BTW, I personally thought was brilliant)

BB
Aren't they just exhausting to argue with? The open ending is one of those topics I've had to defend to so many people it just wears me right out. I empathize with you.

Dukester
A PERFECT example. Bravo!

Baraka Bryan wrote:

GamePlayer wrote:Oh, you'd be amazed at all the people that despise "open endings" and can't distinguish it from a "cliffhanger". I must have had more arguments defending great films with open endings than any other topic about film in my life as a connoisseur of film. That's why I could finish watching this video; the guy is indicative of so many people I've argued with about the virtue of a solid open ending. When I meet those people, they make me tired all over.

i know! back in mid-elementary school we read Lowry's The Giver which has a very famous open ending, and all kinds of classmates are complaining about it being a cliffhanger and we don't know what happened to jonas and blah blah blah... i wanted to smack them upside the head

edit to add: just wikid and saw that she wrote two other books forming a 'loose trilogy' a decade later... that sucks and I think it detracts from the original's impact.

I was going to bring that up as an example! The Giver is probably one of the first books you read in school that takes that approach to story-telling.

I don't think they're so much as a trilogy rather that just a series of books set in the same universe. None of the characters are explored further in any continuation; the other books just give you a look at how some of the other Communities do things.