Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Okay, so far I've only read the House series of the new books. And I am a little worried. Not about how the styles or writing are different, because when I first picked them up I never expected them to be anything like FH's originals. I think that has eased the blow slightly, but I wasnt expecting all the mistakes to pop up all over the place. As I stated in a different thread the one that got to me the most was the life spans of the characters being drastically short when taking the spice. Were talking only 200 years max when FH wrote 400 years.

Now I do not care much about all the silly mistakes in the prequals because I don't think that they add anything to the original series and they if anything make the originals better because you want to read them again to wash your mind and eyes from reading the *insert whatever you use to describe them here*. My main concern however is Hunters and Sandworms which I already own but have never read yet. Am I going to feel the same once I've read them? Without spoiling them too much, am I still going to come across these silly little stupid mistakes from two people where ONE OF THEM (BH!!!!) should have known better. To be honest from the House series they just seem like BH's name was just slapped on them to get the licenece and these are KJA's books.

I read the House and Legends books, and I liked House Atreides, but they got progressively worse and the last Legends book (I can't even remember what it was called) was just atrocious.

I read all six FH books again this year and now I'm reading Hunters. It's bad, but it passes the time on the journey to and from work each day. The worst thing about it is the way Kev'n'Bri casually throw their own characters into the books. I already know who the ancient enemy is going to be, and it turns out to be characters invented by Kev'n'Bri, so the claim that Hunters and Sandworms are based on Frank's notes is a lie. How could Frank have written in his notes that the ancient enemy was going to be two characters invented by his son and his fuckbuddy twenty odd years after Frank died, unless Frank was prescient.

I made it through Hunters and couldn't take any more. I actually didn't find it to be too bad, unitl the last couple of chapters.

chanilover wrote:I read the House and Legends books, and I liked House Atreides, but they got progressively worse and the last Legends book (I can't even remember what it was called) was just atrocious.

I read all six FH books again this year and now I'm reading Hunters. It's bad, but it passes the time on the journey to and from work each day. The worst thing about it is the way Kev'n'Bri casually throw their own characters into the books. I already know who the ancient enemy is going to be, and it turns out to be characters invented by Kev'n'Bri, so the claim that Hunters and Sandworms are based on Frank's notes is a lie. How could Frank have written in his notes that the ancient enemy was going to be two characters invented by his son and his fuckbuddy twenty odd years after Frank died, unless Frank was prescient.

The only thing I can see about who the Honored Matre were running from was these two face dancers, who have some how broken the control over the Teliaxu Masters. But I am not sure how that is an ancient enemy unless I am missing something lol

Well on FH original work there is no mention of an ancient enemy, it's more of an unknown enemy.
And Laphtiya, if you were a bit anoyed by these prequels you are going to be foaming out of your mouth, or at least close to it, when you read Hunters and Sandworms. All i can say is that they dismiss all of Frank's ideas and themes to make their own pow-wow space opera.
Regardless of what it says on the cover, it is not the conclusion to Frank Herberts vision, trust me on that.

That seems to be the general thought lol. Well hopefully my idea of looking at these as a Fanfiction might soften the blow a bit. But I might just be kidding myself lol. An unknown enemy yes I remember that, so yeah then it should be those two face dancers and what ever they have fighting for them. I am sure I will be dissapointed and I'll never read it again. But I would rather read it and know its garbage than be ignorant to it.

Laphtiya wrote:To be honest from the House series they just seem like BH's name was just slapped on them to get the licenece and these are KJA's books.

Ding!-Ding!-Ding!

My latest theory: KJA lets The Other Guy write those silly chapter headings; they read like an unsophisticated child trying to imitate a parent. But the actual text is all KJA. I have less doubt about this every day. Kevie's endless blog ramblings about "trading chapters" with Bri-Bri is just pure myth-making.

I think the agreement is that Brian and Kevin conceptualize together, and Brian can veto anything (read as nothing) but Kevin in the end does all the writing and 90% of the <shiver> brain work. (not a knock at brian's abilities, i just think he's on the sidelines here.)

I thought Hunters was bad-but-tolerable up until about the last fifty pages or so. Then it was bad-and-intolerable. The first two-thirds of Sandworms was mostly bad-and-intolerable, and the last third was just incoherent nonsense.

I actually think that Brian does do a bunch of writing in the first couple of drafts, but that in subsequent drafts, KJA "rewrites" them beyond all recognition. So the end product is mostly KJA.

HBJ

one point I would make to you about Humpers and Armor/Space/Water/Sadworms is the unrelenting repetative nature. These two just think the reader is incapable of remembering what happened 20 pages ago.

They just use, and reuse, and abuse the same story arc's thru the books, to the point your ready to strangle someone.

Another is just two dam many pages, and pages, and pages of endless description of every little thing. You will gasp for Imagination air as you plow thru these.

With that said, one upside is all these things make them really fast reads, because you can skip over whole junks of text. Out of 1500+ pages of nonsense, their might be 300 that are the content of the whole mess..

Just my two cents,
Trang

I read the the first prequel (House) and find it barely Ok, sure it has some contradictions, i tought ''hey, the guys are new to the duniverse...maybe with the time it will be better''

The 2nd prequel ''Legends...'' i found it to be worse than the first one, some things are totally wacko, some explanations are utterly lame, but had the faith that Dune 7 will be great.

Then came Hunters...what a pile of shit, it is like throwing some familiar names, concepts and shit into a mixer for 1 hour, then put the thing in a book, man, Hunters was so bad in many unnatural ways that can't be explained
Sandworms was worse i wont comment anything more, is shit.

In the end...it was a big fucking bussines, yo don't need 3 books in the 1st prequel to explain the amal thing, also dont need 3 Legend's book to explain Omnius and for God's sake, you dont need 2 sequels to explain everything that happened in ''dune 7''

At the end, i give those books it real value, very subpar fan fiction inserted in the dune universe.

Laphtiya wrote:

chanilover wrote:I read the House and Legends books, and I liked House Atreides, but they got progressively worse and the last Legends book (I can't even remember what it was called) was just atrocious.

I read all six FH books again this year and now I'm reading Hunters. It's bad, but it passes the time on the journey to and from work each day. The worst thing about it is the way Kev'n'Bri casually throw their own characters into the books. I already know who the ancient enemy is going to be, and it turns out to be characters invented by Kev'n'Bri, so the claim that Hunters and Sandworms are based on Frank's notes is a lie. How could Frank have written in his notes that the ancient enemy was going to be two characters invented by his son and his fuckbuddy twenty odd years after Frank died, unless Frank was prescient.

The only thing I can see about who the Honored Matre were running from was these two face dancers, who have some how broken the control over the Teliaxu Masters. But I am not sure how that is an ancient enemy unless I am missing something lol

Oh, you're in for a nice surprise when the identities of the old man and woman in Duncan's visions are revealed. To say the revelation is shocking would be wrong. Appalling is probably a better word.

Laphtiya wrote:Okay, so far I've only read the House series of the new books. And I am a little worried. Not about how the styles or writing are different, because when I first picked them up I never expected them to be anything like FH's originals. I think that has eased the blow slightly, but I wasnt expecting all the mistakes to pop up all over the place. As I stated in a different thread the one that got to me the most was the life spans of the characters being drastically short when taking the spice. Were talking only 200 years max when FH wrote 400 years.

Now I do not care much about all the silly mistakes in the prequals because I don't think that they add anything to the original series and they if anything make the originals better because you want to read them again to wash your mind and eyes from reading the *insert whatever you use to describe them here*. My main concern however is Hunters and Sandworms which I already own but have never read yet. Am I going to feel the same once I've read them? Without spoiling them too much, am I still going to come across these silly little stupid mistakes from two people where ONE OF THEM (BH!!!!) should have known better. To be honest from the House series they just seem like BH's name was just slapped on them to get the licenece and these are KJA's books.

If you don't want the books spoiled, I'll only say that Hunters is bad and Sandworms is VERY bad.

I have a feeling they will be the worst thing I've ever read in my life lol. I did like some of the House series. House A was good but the errors really bugged me. But when you look at it from the point of view that I have (that it is fan fiction and not canon) then its not too bad, and you can forgive the SMALL mistakes but not the complete hack jobs.

Reading some parts of House A, I've noticed what is wrong with the way of writing. For instance at the start of House A, Kynes suspects that something terrible happened on Selusa Secundus perhaps a natural event but he isnt sure. This makes sense because its not adding or changing anything. Then they throw in the idea that it was Atomics, this again is okay but then later in the book they refer to it as "After the atomic holocost" of selusa secundus. Now this gives the impression that it is common knowledge that it was Atomics that did this. They seem to be changing with what the reader knows and understands. Which could lead to thinking that there are more mistakes than there actually is. Whereas FH writes from the point of view from characters within the story itself.

In Dune it is descovered that selusa secundus is where the emperor gets his Sardukar troops from, instead of it being a prison planet. Yet it is still refered to as a prison planet by the characters and any and all reference to it. Only we as the reader know what it is (and whenever Shaddam talks about it). Anyone else notice this or is it just me?

You are not alone...it's as if they don't they re-read two pages back before they print...Hell, i don't think KJA and BH check each others writing and they just melt the hole thing together...

Sorry, Rakis, but "the hole thing" is just too funny!

Considering how they pull these things from their holes.

SandChigger wrote:Sorry, Rakis, but "the hole thing" is just too funny!

Considering how they pull these things from their holes.

Hmmm... it was a typpo...

...or was it ?

It was inspired, even if only a typo.

(Or was it your subconscious acting out? )

SandChigger wrote:It was inspired, even if only a typo.

(Or was it your subconscious acting out? )

Nah...I'm consciously acting out : Anything they make DO come from their holes...

TheDukester wrote:

Laphtiya wrote:To be honest from the House series they just seem like BH's name was just slapped on them to get the licenece and these are KJA's books.

Ding!-Ding!-Ding!

My latest theory: KJA lets The Other Guy write those silly chapter headings; they read like an unsophisticated child trying to imitate a parent. But the actual text is all KJA. I have less doubt about this every day. Kevie's endless blog ramblings about "trading chapters" with Bri-Bri is just pure myth-making.

There is one problem with this theory. I've read Brian Herberts 'Dreamer of Dune' and it has the same endless information repetition and boring details as the prequels.

For example, I remember a particularly sleep-inducing scene in one of the Butlerian Jihad books, where Xavier Harkonnen visits his family-home and literally everything he eats/drinks is described.
The same thing happens in 'Dreamer of Dune', where we learn the exact contents of Frank Herberts dinner on some not very interesting evening.

Read their fiction, though.

The Dune books = KJA's Star Wars crap. They look and feel much less like Bri-Bri's Timeweb, et. al.

The more I read the prequals the more I realise that if they had read anything of the originals, it was Chapterhouse and nothing more. And they show this in the prequals by using knowledge from CH. Like the Tleilaxu shouting powinda and everyone knows they are fanatics. Not much mention of spice in CH so thats probably where the mistakes come from about the length of life extension.

They thought "Oh don't bother with reading all of that because we just wanna add to the end" But now there trying to cram stuff between each book, but this shows more and more how they didn't bother to go back and read them. What we knew in Chapterhouse was completely different from Dune. Leto II made sure of this and it seems KJA and BH got it all wrong.

TheDukester:

I haven't read any of KJA or Brians other fiction. Maybe that's a good thing.
But you have... Is it any good? Who do you think is the 'better' writer?

Laphtiya:

I've been thinking about this. According to Brian he's made one big Dune encyclopedia containing all the facts from all the Dune novels. One wonders how the hell they can make so many mistakes in the prequels with such a complete tome at their disposal. My theories of what might have happened:

1. This concordance is written so badly, or constructed in such a messy way, that finding a fact is almost impossible, even for Brian himself.

2. The concordance is just big pile of facts, without any dates attached to the fact. For example Entry Duncan:
- defends the Atreides,
- hated LetoII
- loved Siona
- flees in No-ship
- has all of his memories
etc. etc. etc.

3. We all know KJA 'writes' while he's out hiking. Try to imagine him dictating in his taperecorder and suddenly he's not sure about something.... Wait... He sits down to open his backpack, takes out this huge encyclopedia, checks a fact, puts the thing back in the sack and starts walking again. Five minutes later he has to this all over again. And again. And again. And again. To make my point: I don't believe KJA checks the facts that often.

4. BH/KJA don't understand the facts themselves.

5. BH/KJA don't want to check the facts. lazyness perhaps.

6. BH/KJA do check the facts, but if a fact doesn't match their stupid idea, they ignore it. Makes you wonder why they wrote this corcordance in the first place.

7. They lost the concordance. Can't find it anywhere.

8. The editors don't care about checking the facts. On the last page of 'Sandworms' they specificly thank a person named dr. Attila Torkos for checking the facts and consistency. Was this 'editor' sleeping or what?

I'd say they don't check them, or that they do not understand them. Because how could you mistake the length of life that the spice gives you. If they had actually read the books they would know the mistakes. Again they probably just skimmed over character outlines for the established characters, read Chapterhouse and decided to make up the stuff from what they thought was good.

Is it me or do any of you get a hint that they watched the 1985 movie and used that in their books?

Laphtiya wrote: Is it me or do any of you get a hint that they watched the 1985 movie and used that in their books?

I don't know. I'm sure they saw the movie. But can you give a specific example of something that's in the movie and the prequels, but not in the original books?