Brian Herbert writes McDune: Any real proof?

[SandChigger]

Can anyone think of any actual, verifiable evidence that Brian Herbert really is involved in the writing, editing and proofreading of these books?

Pictures of Brian and Kevin with their matching Macs are not proof. Statements by Kevin, Byron, suck-up "personal friend" Shawn Speakman (Webdruid), or even Brian himself that Brian is involved are also not proof. When I was thinking about this again the other day, I could only think of one thing that could be taken as evidence:

There was an example of a message supposedly passed between Brian and Kevin during the editing phase of one of their short stories ("Hunting Harkonnens", maybe?) that accidently got left in and appeared in some printed(?) version of the story. IIRC Nekhrun had a copy and posted the text before, either on DN while we were all still there or on Arrakeen, maybe? I don't think it's been reposted here yet. (Nekhrun, do you still have the copy, and could you repost the passage here?)

The more I thought about this one, though, the more I wondered. OK, we know the editorial staff assigned to the McDune books and stories thus far appears to have been sleeping on the job most of the time. So it seems plausible that an edit message about a plot point from Brian to Kevin could have gotten through and ended up in print.

Or does it?

My willingness to believe anything these people say, write, or do is now non-existent. Maybe the message was crafted and intentionally inserted to make it look like Brian is involved.

Too paranoid/conspiracy theory? You tell me.

(And even if it was authentic, if I recall what it was about correctly, it at most indicates that Brian was looking over/checking the manuscript, not that he had actually written any of it.)

[SandRider]

I guess somebody could run writing samples thru one of those
pattern recognition computer programs ....

but that would be assuming WetBrain actually wrote TimeWeb,
and not Merritt ....

the old Dune Blogs that were all "Brian and Kevin" did this and that
couldn't be used, either. It looked like The Keith wrote all those,
but that could have been Merritt, too ....

shit, maybe Merritt wrote it all - that would explain his
hissy-fits at real criticism ....

[trang]

I dont have any evidence that Kevin wrote them all, but this got me to thinking, what if the reverse is true???

House/Legends are better(if you could call it that) that hunters/sandworms/POD. Overall the writing....plot diversion..Dialogue..outright BS mistakes... get worse and worse with each book "they" put out.

I have most of Brians books, while I havent read any of them completly yet, I notice a style that is pretty bad.

What if Kevin did all the writing early on, and brian got pissed and decided he would take kevin's input then lay it out himself?? WHy you say? well Kevin is obviously the better front/Con man, marketer, beguiler... brian is timid and lethargic.

I have no doubt that most if not all the ideas are kevins, as he has demonstrated very heavily, across many franchise type titles, that he can take other peoples ideas, inject his HUGE stupidity, and come out with something on paper.

Just a twist, let your eye follow the bouncing ball across the ten books and see if you see anything.

[TheDukester]

Pictures of Brian and Kevin with their matching Macs are not proof.

Especially when they almost look like they've got no power (both the computers and the authors).

Ahem. Okay, I'll actually go a step further: I don't believe Brian does any writing at all. None. Not a word.

In addition to the many excellent points raised above, I'll add something that's been bugging me for the past couple of weeks: how can it be, exactly, that the world's fastest "writer" and one of the world's slowest individuals are somehow able to mesh the timing on all of these McDune books? Think about it for a minute. TheKJA is out talking into a recorder just as fast as his lips will move, handing everything off to a typist as quick as he can, and instantly moving on to the next project. He does this every day of his life.

And over here we've got Bobo on his island in Washington ... a guy who's never been mistaken for being very swift, a guy who allegedly hates computers and doesn't even use email, a guy who has managed to push out a weak selection of seven or so books in his lifetime despite being solidly in his 60s.

How do these two individuals mesh their schedules?

Does TheKJA somehow slow himself down to Bobo's more pedestrian pace? Not according to his own blogs, Twatter posts, etc., all of which paint a picture of a foaming madman obsessed with quantity. Does Bobo somehow find an extra gear when working on this nu-Dune crap? Not bloody likely ... and, as Chiggie says, where's the evidence?

No, sorry, HLP, but no sale. I think it's all a big charade to get the "correct" name out on the covers, to fool the pretards into repeating their "but he's Frank's son!" litany, and to keep everyone involved depositing fat annual checks. I'm certain that Bobo has some editing duties, and it's likely they do, in fact, "brainstorm" (to use TheKJA's favorite word ever), but I grow more convinced every day that the McDune nonsense is pure, 100-percent Anderson.

+++++

Byron Merritt: prove me wrong. I'm publicly offering, right now, to donate $250 to the charity of your choice, in your name, for evidence that Brian Herbert does any writing for the McKJA series. Brian in front of a Mac laptop with a dead battery does not count.

Provide some form of convincing evidence that Brian does any writing for this series and I'll make out the check the next day.

[A Thing of Eternity]

Pictures of Brian and Kevin with their matching Macs are not proof.

Especially when they almost look like they've got no power (both the computers and the authors).

Ahem. Okay, I'll actually go a step further: I don't believe Brian does any writing at all. None. Not a word.

In addition to the many excellent points raised above, I'll add something that's been bugging me for the past couple of weeks: how can it be, exactly, that the world's fastest "writer" and one of the world's slowest individuals are somehow able to mesh the timing on all of these McDune books? Think about it for a minute. TheKJA is out talking into a recorder just as fast as his lips will move, handing everything off to a typist as quick as he can, and instantly moving on to the next project. He does this every day of his life.

And over here we've got Bobo on his island in Washington ... a guy who's never been mistaken for being very swift, a guy who allegedly hates computers and doesn't even use email, a guy who has managed to push out a weak selection of seven or so books in his lifetime despite being solidly in his 60s.

How do these two individuals mesh their schedules?

Does TheKJA somehow slow himself down to Bobo's more pedestrian pace? Not according to his own blogs, Twatter posts, etc., all of which paint a picture of a foaming madman obsessed with quantity. Does Bobo somehow find an extra gear when working on this nu-Dune crap? Not bloody likely ... and, as Chiggie says, where's the evidence?

No, sorry, HLP, but no sale. I think it's all a big charade to get the "correct" name out on the covers, to fool the pretards into repeating their "but he's Frank's son!" litany, and to keep everyone involved depositing fat annual checks. I'm certain that Bobo has some editing duties, and it's likely they do, in fact, "brainstorm" (to use TheKJA's favorite word ever), but I grow more convinced every day that the McDune nonsense is pure, 100-percent Anderson.

+++++

Byron Merritt: prove me wrong. I'm publicly offering, right now, to donate $250 to the charity of your choice, in your name, for evidence that Brian Herbert does any writing for the McKJA series. Brian in front of a Mac laptop with a dead battery does not count.

Provide some form of convincing evidence that Brian does any writing for this series and I'll make out the check the next day.

Goooooood point about the timing. No way Kev slows down, and no way BriBri keeps up... but when Kev seems to be juuust finishing a book so is Brian. Maybe Brian is writing loose ideas down and sending those to Kev to get hiked out? I can't see him not being involved at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if not a single sentence of his actually made it to final draft.

[Hunchback Jack]

I think Brian probably does contribute ideas to the story, and does write a few chapters, but I'm sure they get edited to death by KJA. So the final product is no doubt mostly KJA.

No evidence for that, other than statements in interviews, etc.

HBJ

[SandChigger]

As for the timing-mismatch, Kevin has blogged before about Brian not being finished with his half of the chapters. I think it was back on Hunters or Sandworms, but it could have been Paul.

I love conspiracy theories. Maybe Brian doesn't even exist.


It would be very simple for Kevin or Brian to provide file copies of the successive versions of drafts of some chapter written and edited by each of them for some previous book. That would be interesting in more than one way.

I'd also like to see Kevin upload one of his dictahiking sessions for a previous book. Show us what someone dictating "perfect prose" sounds like.

[Hunchback Jack]

Definitely the question is worth asking. No-Dune reads pretty much like any random KJA-ese you pick up.

(BTW, leafed through Asses of Worlds in my local library the other day. 170-odd chapters? Some only half a page? Sorry, but I prefer books that generate drama by making me care about the characters, not by switching scenes every page or two.)

HBJ

[Rakis]

Bah...we always said BB was a sockpuppet for KJA...i would not be surprise if he was there by name only, just to push sales for 2 or 3 more books...

[GamePlayer]

Impossible to tell. If Brian and Kevin had a distinct style, it would be easy to identify who was writing what. But the nature of mediocrity is such that there is no style and hence their work is indistinguishable from any other piece of low brow writing.

[Freakzilla]

Come on... these guys offered pictures of floppy disks as proof of the existance of FH's notes and outline for Dune 7, you really think they would be bright and forethinking enough to plant a "missed editorial note"?

[Rakis]

i hope your BB is referring to bobo

Ah fuck...i meant BH...

Let's keep BB for Brian the brain...

[Seraphan]

Who the fuck's this Brian you're all talking about?

[Omphalos]

I think that Brian died in the plane crash years ago. Kevin has just been propping him up and waving his hands around, a'la Weekend at Bernie's. And the real joke is not that Brian has dug up his father's corpse to bugger it. Its that Kevin and Becca are doing that to Brian literally, then to FH's memory figuratively. It all fits, doesn't it?

[GamePlayer]

Who the fuck's this Brian you're all talking about?

Most know him as "that other guy"

[DuneFishUK]

IIRC the edit note was something along the lines of 'Kev, shouldn't there be more robots'. - Surely if they were actually equal partners Brian would have just more robots?

Is KJA colourful in his own books? One thing I recognised from Sidney's Comet and Mo2W were the colours. FH used colour, but Brian abuses colour. Everything is yellow, pink and green with blue spots.

I'm wondering now: does Kevin adjust the manuscript to reflect what colour crayons Brian has used on it?

[Nekhrun]

There was an example of a message supposedly passed between Brian and Kevin during the editing phase of one of their short stories ("Hunting Harkonnens", maybe?) that accidently got left in and appeared in some printed(?) version of the story. IIRC Nekhrun had a copy and posted the text before, either on DN while we were all still there or on Arrakeen, maybe? I don't think it's been reposted here yet. (Nekhrun, do you still have the copy, and could you repost the passage here?)

The more I thought about this one, though, the more I wondered. OK, we know the editorial staff assigned to the McDune books and stories thus far appears to have been sleeping on the job most of the time. So it seems plausible that an edit message about a plot point from Brian to Kevin could have gotten through and ended up in print.

Sorry I'm late to the party here you go: From page 14 of Hunting Harkonnens



I've always thought that Brian wrote a little bit of House Harkonnen because it seemed slightly less terrible, but he's such a shit writer too it's hard to account for the real difference.

[TheDukester]

That's just truly embarrassing for everyone involved.

What happened to the fabled test readers? What happened to the editors? What happened to Fucknuts and Airplane Boy doing one of their "sitting down for the 10th time with galleys?" bullshit that they're always spouting? What happened to any oversight at all from the HLP?

Absolutely useless, the entire lot of them.

[SandChigger]

And it also shows that even if Kevin does dictahike "perfect prose", he most definitely doesn't give "perfect story" every time.

Thanks for reposting that, Nekhrun! (IIRC, wherever you posted it the first time, we tried to come up with prequelite-like rationalizations for the text that made it an intentional part of the story ... like "Kev" was the name of some Jihad-period diety, etc. )

You see what I mean, though, about it being possible to read that as a question from someone who is simply reading through the story?

[Nekhrun]

And it also shows that even if Kevin does dictahike "perfect prose", he most definitely doesn't give "perfect story" every time.

Thanks for reposting that, Nekhrun! (IIRC, wherever you posted it the first time, we tried to come up with prequelite-like rationalizations for the text that made it an intentional part of the story ... like "Kev" was the name of some Jihad-period diety, etc. )

You see what I mean, though, about it being possible to read that as a question from someone who is simply reading through the story?

That reminds me, when I went to look for that way back when I meant to go through it and write up an analysis of the main character's relationship with his father. It seems pretty autobiographical. It's back on my To Do list.

[cmsahe]

That's just truly embarrassing for everyone involved.

What happened to the fabled test readers? What happened to the editors? What happened to Fucknuts and Airplane Boy doing one of their "sitting down for the 10th time with galleys?" bullshit that they're always spouting? What happened to any oversight at all from the HLP?

Absolutely useless, the entire lot of them.

Remember that Byron banned us for not being Professionals!