Further Weak Writing Examples - ATTN: REDBUGPEST
Posted: 24 Jun 2009 13:16
By the time of God Emperor of Dune, humanity has spread out across the universe, into many different galaxies. This is not debatable. In my last thread, I talked about how Omnius simply could not have travelled to the outskirts of the Scattering via broadcast, in this thread we will look at a vastly larger mistake by KJA. Not only did he fail to plausibly get Omnius to the edge of the Scattering – he actually FORGOT how far the Scattering is. Hunters and Sandworms are written as if the entire human race was contained within ONE galaxy! The books actually claim that some parts of the Scattering are WITHIN the one galaxy! This is a slightly reworded version of a post I made over at DN, a post that Byron and the rest failed miserably to argue against! Let us begin…
Sandworms is written in a way that clearly shows all of humanity to be contained within one galaxy, in a way that stops making any sense as soon as the multi-galaxy idea is introduced. I’m not so purely OH that the fact that these books contradict the originals is my biggest issue with them – my biggest issue it that they are bad writing. Period. The fact that they mentioned multiple galaxies in Hunters and then persisted to write the novels that the way they did is the height of contradictory writing, I’m honestly blown away by how little sense these books make now, I had previously missed/forgotten the passage in Hunters where they do mention multiple galaxies, and had assumed that the authors did not know about the multiple galaxies, or were hoping that no one noticed the inconsistency.
There are two options for opinions:
1 – Sandworms does in fact take place in just one galaxy, contradicting FH and, apparently, Hunters (maybe KJABH didn’t even realize that they wrote “multigalactic” in Hunters, or didn’t stop to think about what that word means. That’s actually not very far fetched considering how they call the machine ships “lightspeed” in Sandworms when they clearly are faster-than-lightspeed ships)
2 – Sandworms now makes no sense at all.
Based on the fact that in Hunters they do mention the multiple galaxies, I guess I’m going to have to go with number 2. The authors knew about the multi-galactic setting, but wrote the entire plot as if there were only one galaxy. So now we’ve gone from a book that contradicted FH (and still does) to a book that is so poorly written it hurts. Things don’t have to be spelled out to contradict each other, and I can show a number of contradictions in regards to the scattering within the Dune 7 books. Here’s a few problems that come to mind.
- Leto II's empire was multi-galactic... but in Sandworms the machines are (supposedly) conquering worlds from the Scattering (as stated by the narrator and BG, so this is not a machine mistake) WITHIN the one galaxy. I don't think that planets within the old empire could have counted as being from the scattering… so this is pretty painful.
Supporting quote:
- To elaborate on how KJABH didn’t think this through very well we can look at where the machines were found and where the HM originated from. The Machines are clearly found within the old empire galaxy, but the Enemy was found in some of the farthest reaches of the scattering (galaxies very, very far away). How can they be on the outskirts of the scattering and inside the old empire at the same time?
Supporting Quote:
- The characters (BG) talk about how they cannot "run away" and how all of humanity is going to be doomed. IF this story contained a multi-galactic humanity neither of those opinions would have been voiced by the BG - they could easily run away further than the machines could find them, and most of humanity would already be safe and away. This supports the idea that BH&KJA were writing about all of humanity being in that galaxy. Even with the FD helping the machines using foldspace ship’s they’d never find all the scattered humans. Overlooking obvious weaknesses like this is a trademark of cheap fiction.
Supporting quote:
Also, I’d like to elaborate on my response to something Byron said in an earlier post.
Quote Byron:
Sandworms is written in a way that clearly shows all of humanity to be contained within one galaxy, in a way that stops making any sense as soon as the multi-galaxy idea is introduced. I’m not so purely OH that the fact that these books contradict the originals is my biggest issue with them – my biggest issue it that they are bad writing. Period. The fact that they mentioned multiple galaxies in Hunters and then persisted to write the novels that the way they did is the height of contradictory writing, I’m honestly blown away by how little sense these books make now, I had previously missed/forgotten the passage in Hunters where they do mention multiple galaxies, and had assumed that the authors did not know about the multiple galaxies, or were hoping that no one noticed the inconsistency.
There are two options for opinions:
1 – Sandworms does in fact take place in just one galaxy, contradicting FH and, apparently, Hunters (maybe KJABH didn’t even realize that they wrote “multigalactic” in Hunters, or didn’t stop to think about what that word means. That’s actually not very far fetched considering how they call the machine ships “lightspeed” in Sandworms when they clearly are faster-than-lightspeed ships)
2 – Sandworms now makes no sense at all.
Based on the fact that in Hunters they do mention the multiple galaxies, I guess I’m going to have to go with number 2. The authors knew about the multi-galactic setting, but wrote the entire plot as if there were only one galaxy. So now we’ve gone from a book that contradicted FH (and still does) to a book that is so poorly written it hurts. Things don’t have to be spelled out to contradict each other, and I can show a number of contradictions in regards to the scattering within the Dune 7 books. Here’s a few problems that come to mind.
- Leto II's empire was multi-galactic... but in Sandworms the machines are (supposedly) conquering worlds from the Scattering (as stated by the narrator and BG, so this is not a machine mistake) WITHIN the one galaxy. I don't think that planets within the old empire could have counted as being from the scattering… so this is pretty painful.
Supporting quote:
~ SandwormsStartling the assemblage, a large holographic projection appeared, filling the open space
of the Keep's great meeting room with detailed maps of the galaxy's numerous solar systems.
An advancing blot indicated the thinking machines' conquests, like a tidal wave drowning every
system in its path. The darkness of defeat and extermination had already blackened most of the
known systems in the regions of the Scattering.
- To elaborate on how KJABH didn’t think this through very well we can look at where the machines were found and where the HM originated from. The Machines are clearly found within the old empire galaxy, but the Enemy was found in some of the farthest reaches of the scattering (galaxies very, very far away). How can they be on the outskirts of the scattering and inside the old empire at the same time?
Supporting Quote:
~ HuntersAfter his assassination, human civilization fragmented. Fleeing to the far reaches of the galaxy in the Scattering, people
became hardened by their privations until the worst sort of humans - Honored Matres – had blundered into the burgeoning machine empire....
- The characters (BG) talk about how they cannot "run away" and how all of humanity is going to be doomed. IF this story contained a multi-galactic humanity neither of those opinions would have been voiced by the BG - they could easily run away further than the machines could find them, and most of humanity would already be safe and away. This supports the idea that BH&KJA were writing about all of humanity being in that galaxy. Even with the FD helping the machines using foldspace ship’s they’d never find all the scattered humans. Overlooking obvious weaknesses like this is a trademark of cheap fiction.
Supporting quote:
~ Sandworms“We can't survive simply by running or by breeding faster than Omnius can kill us.”
Also, I’d like to elaborate on my response to something Byron said in an earlier post.
Quote Byron:
- Actually the machines would have known all about this from simply asking the FD, or from some simple intelligence work in the old empire. It’s kind of a common topic, hard for the machines to miss… and we’ve established that the old empire itself was multi-galactic, so the machines really would have known about this whole “un-conquerable” thing pretty easily. So again, this is an example of poor writing if this is the excuse that the authors want to go with on this mistake. Another example of the machines being too unintelligent to handle simple tasks… and an unintelligent super AI = bad writing.I believe one of the thinking machines states this, but since the machines were not present at the scattering, they certainly don’t know if other humans have traveled to other galaxies.
... seemed necessary.