Seems like they are going through the novels from this list
HBJ
"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars."
- Carl Sagan
I'm still very proud of The Quarry but … let's face it; in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.
- Iain Banks
Omphalos wrote:Like these ass-smacks are going to make better anything that Herbert disliked enough to shelve.
Said it before, but I don't think they are going to "make better".
Type up - yes.
Correct the mistakes he made while typing it up - some of them.. oh look, a Transformer!
Alter anything beyond a bit of word order? - Quicker they publish it, quicker the cheque comes in.
Omphalos wrote:FUCK i hate these corpse raping douche nozzles.
I think that's unfair - they're releasing these lost classics because they genuinely care about... lol... sorry, no - I can't say that with a straight face...
DuneFishUK wrote:I think that's unfair - they're releasing these lost classics because they genuinely care about... lol... sorry, no - I can't say that with a straight face...
DuneFishUK wrote:[I think that's unfair - they're releasing these lost classics because they genuinely care about... lol... sorry, no - I can't say that with a straight face...
You had me going there for a minute.
HBJ
"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars."
- Carl Sagan
I'm still very proud of The Quarry but … let's face it; in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.
- Iain Banks
ULFsurfer wrote:But really, why are they doing this? Does anyone here have any hunch on how many copies they've sold of "High-Opp"? I have a feeling not too many.
I'm sure he'd do it for free just to have his name attached to FH in just one more way, all while acting as if he's working to preserve the legacy. Now he's forever a footnote in history because of how he was able to glom on to yet another successful franchise.
"If he was here to discuss Dune, he sure as hell picked a dumb way to do it." -Omphalos
Happy Memorial Day everyone! -James C. Harwood
"Three of my videos have over 100 views."
"Over 500 views for my 'Open Question' video." -Nebiros
ULFsurfer wrote:But really, why are they doing this? Does anyone here have any hunch on how many copies they've sold of "High-Opp"? I have a feeling not too many.
In the aggregate this stuff all adds up to something big.
DuneFishUK wrote:He does it to raise the profile of Wordfire Press.
Clever. Does Wordfire handle the print edition too? Once they've got enough momentum to fund large print runs, KJA and Brian Herbert can start self-publishing McDune. Obviously, they don't need the editing, proofreading and marketing services that a large publisher provides.
DuneFishUK wrote:He does it to raise the profile of Wordfire Press.
Clever. Does Wordfire handle the print edition too?
Yes, they do.
Why does KJA do it? So he can say that he did it. So that he can add "Frank Herbert's editor and publisher" right after "bestselling author" in his bio.
Oh, and for the money - publishing ebooks and a small amount of print copies doesn't cost much. They wouldn't have to sell many to break even. And I'm sure KJA *loves* the fact he's bypassing those evil greedy corporate publishing houses - all the while telling himself that he's on the cutting edge of the "new publishing".
What's really sad is that if they really cared about FH's legacy, they'd have either not published this at all, or shopped it around to the large publishers. High-Opp is, as far as I can determine, pretty much unknown to most SF readers. If it had been a headline release from Tor in the fall, touted and marketed as "Frank Herbert's lost novel", it would have sold *many* more copies, I'm guessing.
HBJ
"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars."
- Carl Sagan
I'm still very proud of The Quarry but … let's face it; in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.
- Iain Banks
I'm about 60% in the book. This is NOT science fiction. This is FH writing as a jungle survival instructor. It is easy to see he is very knowledgeable in his subject-matter and his jungle descriptions are very vivid and detailed.
It is a very tight psychological thriller where a motley crew of passengers aboard a plane (the pilot, a woman and her little boy, and an adventurer) find themselves chased by the Indians down the river deep in the jungle, with a broken motor, hungry, and faced also with the jungle in their hearts. One of them holds a big secret, the others start to suspect it and they start thinking it over and over bringing about the inner thought pattern we are familiar with through the Dune novels.
You just don't relax while reading this, the danger of the Indians lurking in the next river bend, the school of piranha following the plane and the flock of insects (especially the INSECTS!) is omnipresent and gets to you!
The interplay of the characters is well drawn. It's almost a game with one character to taunt the other to the breaking point (this expression is a loan from Ebert's review of Cape Fear). This is because it felt to me as a book that Cape Fear could have been loosely based on, this reads as Jungle or River Fear!
Since this also reads at some level as a journal of their passage through the jungle (which takes very long with a broken motor), It gets kinda tedious/repetitive with reference to their day-to-day navigation down the river.
The adventurer is also a philosophy teacher, so you have existential anxiety and introspection on top of the survival theme.
Finished it yesterday night. Nothing much to add, except that in the end justice prevailed as it should!
A final note on this is based on a couple of letters by FH to his then agents, which are included in the e-book by way of foreword.
These letter show that FH tried repeatedly to have this book published, failed the first time round (with Lurton Blassingame in 1957), stopped his association with him and retried with another agent called Halsey. FH rewrote large parts of the original draft so that when he contacted Halsey (in 1962) the story was very different from what he showed to Blassingame.
As FH himself wrote to Halsey the story was written with a low-budget movie version in mind. This seems to me to show that FH himself thought this to be an average story, worthy of publication perhaps in his own mind as well as being the basis for a movie but not much more than an extended script ...
I suppose after the success of DUNE he simply couldn't/wouldn't be bothered with this story anymore