Amp's SoD Notes
Posted: 11 Jan 2012 16:28
Okay well maybe that title is misleading, since I'm not going to do the page by page rundown of this latest "book".
Why?
1. I haven't read the previous trilogy in a long time, and unless you're going to take up a collection for my psychotherapy/legal defense fund, I'm not going to do it again.
2. Too many things in the book would require 1 to be fully understood. I'm assuming. Its hard to tell amongst all the things that can't be understood without the disclaimer "A Moron Dictated this while hiking in the thin mountain air, then edited it while watching summer blockbusters on DVD"
What I will do is keep a running commentary of my impressions, before I work on my final review.
Now to start, I'll begin with a bombshell.
This is the best Dune book they have written.
WHA? Has Amp turned traitor? GET THE HANGIN TRIPOD!
No no no my fellow cast out, let me explain.
When I say best, remember the caveat that this is still a KJA book, meaning it was still written by the most philistine hack alive. (Hey Kev, philistine means you don't hold anything sacred, not that I'm accusing you of being a biblical tribe of pirates and raiders that made their living stealing everything, including the most sacred of objects, from those who had no defense. Wait, no you'd fit right in with them.)
What I mean is that this book is not a Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson Dune book. This is a Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson and TOR's entire production/editorial staff trying to resuscitate a milked-dead cash-cow.
The first two chapters stank of a third hand (or more) overlooking the process. It felt as if Team McDune had sat down and edited, re-editied, polished and actually thought about a finished product, rather than simply letting it fall out the mouth of a hiking hack onto paper.
The font and type appear to be much smaller and more closely spaced in order to give it a more serious appearance, rather than the larger kid-friendly (less imposing) type of the other books.
EDIT: This is the best Dune book they have produced. Make more sense now?
So far the story is the same ridiculous shit we've been expecting. The anti-tech Butlerians are the bad guys, everyone still has and NEEDS computers, and the CET was a massive failure of pious idiots who just made everyone mad at religious idiots, and the Orange Catholic Bible needs massive re-editing by the Emperor. Yeah, the Emperor (well his lackeys, but King John, er I mean Emperor Salvador organized the effort). Oh, and there is a shit ton of 'clever' little addenums that are supposed to make you nod your head at how clever the authors are, but instead enrage you because its like your 5 year old nephew trying to impress you with his clever use of names like Anna Corrino (Anna Karenina) for the Emperor's sister who, yes, is having an affair in the court.
Fuck you. And guess what, I haven't even read Anna Karenina and I thought your pun was shit.
They rip-off Dune's dinner party scene, blatantly. It's so fucktardedly obvious that the only way they can save it is by having Norma Cenva pop in in her Spice tank, tell the Emperor that all that neat tech the thinking machines left behind is the only thing that will save the universe, then pop out. Bitch did that shit with her mind!
Yeah, tech and god will save the universe, and everyone knows the navigators are mutated and doesn't give a fuck. Especially the Sisterhood, WHO WON'T FORGET.
Gilbertus looks exactly like a college professor. Write down the most stereotypical college professor you can think of. You just described him. Not kidding, you haven't read the book and you can picture him in your head. He also has Erasmus' brain core hidden away so no one will know he has it, even though he has permission from the Butlerians to have thinking machine tech for training mentats and has it lying around everywhere. But no, this one specific core he can't let anyone know he has, so much so that its in a hidden safe, inside his hidden safe. If he left it on his desk, no one would even notice he had it, or care.
Basically, we have mentats thanks to Erasmus, is what they are telling us.
So many things are nuances that Frank would just tell you were true, rather than wink wink nudge nudge you to death then act like it was some super-awesome plot that you could never have figured out. Like that the spice harvesters best native agent is a Fremen. Or that the guy in charge of security was the one who called in a fake bomb threat to the Landsraad when the Butlerians were getting all idiot pious and demanding they vote on wither the Landsraad thought the machines were evil. Or that the evolutionary sidekick of the Worms of Arrakiss (Which haven't been mentioned yet even with all the talk about spice harvesting...) will more than likely be the source of the poison which the Sisterhood uses to become RM's
Oh, and Venholdport whatever, has to deal with smugglers tapping into his spice business. But as far as I can tell the only people right now who use the spice are Ven's Navigators. So WTF would anyone else bother with it? Its as if they had the keywords SPICE and SMUGGLERS on their to-do list, but didn't bother with WHY IT MATTERS NOW TO ANYONE ELSE.
Strangely missing (so far) is the ultra-repetitiveness, which in this case might have been a good thing seeing as how so much of what we thought this book would be about, has already happened.
more to come...
Why?
1. I haven't read the previous trilogy in a long time, and unless you're going to take up a collection for my psychotherapy/legal defense fund, I'm not going to do it again.
2. Too many things in the book would require 1 to be fully understood. I'm assuming. Its hard to tell amongst all the things that can't be understood without the disclaimer "A Moron Dictated this while hiking in the thin mountain air, then edited it while watching summer blockbusters on DVD"
What I will do is keep a running commentary of my impressions, before I work on my final review.
Now to start, I'll begin with a bombshell.
This is the best Dune book they have written.
WHA? Has Amp turned traitor? GET THE HANGIN TRIPOD!
No no no my fellow cast out, let me explain.
When I say best, remember the caveat that this is still a KJA book, meaning it was still written by the most philistine hack alive. (Hey Kev, philistine means you don't hold anything sacred, not that I'm accusing you of being a biblical tribe of pirates and raiders that made their living stealing everything, including the most sacred of objects, from those who had no defense. Wait, no you'd fit right in with them.)
What I mean is that this book is not a Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson Dune book. This is a Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson and TOR's entire production/editorial staff trying to resuscitate a milked-dead cash-cow.
The first two chapters stank of a third hand (or more) overlooking the process. It felt as if Team McDune had sat down and edited, re-editied, polished and actually thought about a finished product, rather than simply letting it fall out the mouth of a hiking hack onto paper.
The font and type appear to be much smaller and more closely spaced in order to give it a more serious appearance, rather than the larger kid-friendly (less imposing) type of the other books.
EDIT: This is the best Dune book they have produced. Make more sense now?
So far the story is the same ridiculous shit we've been expecting. The anti-tech Butlerians are the bad guys, everyone still has and NEEDS computers, and the CET was a massive failure of pious idiots who just made everyone mad at religious idiots, and the Orange Catholic Bible needs massive re-editing by the Emperor. Yeah, the Emperor (well his lackeys, but King John, er I mean Emperor Salvador organized the effort). Oh, and there is a shit ton of 'clever' little addenums that are supposed to make you nod your head at how clever the authors are, but instead enrage you because its like your 5 year old nephew trying to impress you with his clever use of names like Anna Corrino (Anna Karenina) for the Emperor's sister who, yes, is having an affair in the court.
Fuck you. And guess what, I haven't even read Anna Karenina and I thought your pun was shit.
They rip-off Dune's dinner party scene, blatantly. It's so fucktardedly obvious that the only way they can save it is by having Norma Cenva pop in in her Spice tank, tell the Emperor that all that neat tech the thinking machines left behind is the only thing that will save the universe, then pop out. Bitch did that shit with her mind!
Yeah, tech and god will save the universe, and everyone knows the navigators are mutated and doesn't give a fuck. Especially the Sisterhood, WHO WON'T FORGET.
Gilbertus looks exactly like a college professor. Write down the most stereotypical college professor you can think of. You just described him. Not kidding, you haven't read the book and you can picture him in your head. He also has Erasmus' brain core hidden away so no one will know he has it, even though he has permission from the Butlerians to have thinking machine tech for training mentats and has it lying around everywhere. But no, this one specific core he can't let anyone know he has, so much so that its in a hidden safe, inside his hidden safe. If he left it on his desk, no one would even notice he had it, or care.
Basically, we have mentats thanks to Erasmus, is what they are telling us.
So many things are nuances that Frank would just tell you were true, rather than wink wink nudge nudge you to death then act like it was some super-awesome plot that you could never have figured out. Like that the spice harvesters best native agent is a Fremen. Or that the guy in charge of security was the one who called in a fake bomb threat to the Landsraad when the Butlerians were getting all idiot pious and demanding they vote on wither the Landsraad thought the machines were evil. Or that the evolutionary sidekick of the Worms of Arrakiss (Which haven't been mentioned yet even with all the talk about spice harvesting...) will more than likely be the source of the poison which the Sisterhood uses to become RM's
Oh, and Venholdport whatever, has to deal with smugglers tapping into his spice business. But as far as I can tell the only people right now who use the spice are Ven's Navigators. So WTF would anyone else bother with it? Its as if they had the keywords SPICE and SMUGGLERS on their to-do list, but didn't bother with WHY IT MATTERS NOW TO ANYONE ELSE.
Strangely missing (so far) is the ultra-repetitiveness, which in this case might have been a good thing seeing as how so much of what we thought this book would be about, has already happened.
more to come...
)
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