Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

After you mentioned them on the Canon Inconsistency Concordance, I was going to ask where these email interviews could be seen (only been here a year after all!) - now I don't have to. Thanks Chig - just read the first one, very enlightening. He doesn't change does he.

no he's still a fucking moron

(Sorry if that sounds snippy, but it’s very frustrating for me after all the incredible work and sweat and attention we put into writing these novels for somebody to nitpick about something so inconsequential.)

Sev wrote:After you mentioned them on the Canon Inconsistency Concordance, I was going to ask where these email interviews could be seen (only been here a year after all!) - now I don't have to. Thanks Chig - just read the first one, very enlightening. He doesn't change does he.

Sorry, it's something I've been meaning to do for a LONG time and finally got around to starting. A lot of it's just banal shit, and the message I posted first is probably the best in the sense of being the most informative. The rest will mostly serve to prove the pattern we're already familiar with. The email interview is in there, too, and I'm not sure if I'll put them on the same or their own page. Probably the latter.

KJA wrote:It was more creative sense and common sense. If Frank had completed Dune 7 a year or two after Chapterhouse, he probably could have pulled it off.

The conceit in that sentence is flabbergasting.

and revealing on the way he thinks about writing a story

The man's arrogance is simply breathtaking.

And it's not even earned arrogance. He's not a real writer — he's a talentless Rent-A-Hack™.

DicklessHack wrote:Before House Atreides, the readership of DUNE had dwindled drastically and those who made it all the way through to Chapterhouse were a mere trickle. After the “House” books, many more people went back to the original chronicles and reread them, or read them for the first time. We received many letters from fans who had given up repeatedly on Heretics and Chapterhouse, but after reading further background in the House books, they tried again and it made sense to them. After the publication of the Jihad trilogy, those sorts of letters increased tenfold. As each book came out, more and more readers finished the Dune chronicles all the way through to the end of Chapterhouse.

Outrageous bullshit. And more of the "many letters" thing. I've got a theory that anytime Anderjacket encounters anything in the plural, it becomes "many." Thus, two letters become "many" letters.

Beyond which, it's outrageous bullshit, in case I haven't mentioned that. The six-book canon series was doing just fine every time I looked; it needed no "help" from a couple of greedy no-talents.

You know what would have gotten more and more people involved in the series, with or without Hacky and Bobo? The internet. As the 'net grew and matured in the late '90s, as fans become more organized and grouped together, as these different communities grew and spread, many new readers would have discovered the series and many grizzled SF veterans would have re-discovered it. No one needed a dumbed-down McDune Lite from two talent-free dickheads.

TheDukester wrote:No one needed a dumbed-down McDune Lite from two talent-free dickheads.

Nah nah nah! Not exactly true!

The Herbert/Merritt clan obviously needed it to help the general coffers refill!

TheDukester wrote:I've got a theory that anytime Anderjacket encounters anything in the plural, it becomes "many." Thus, two letters become "many" letters.

This is something that seems so obvious that I can't believe it hasn't been brought up before. This is exactly how he operates. Nice analysis.

PDFs or it didn't happen, ass-scratch.

A new (proper) movie would have generated orders of magnitude more interest in Dune than all their novels have combined to date.

Some complained that we used no-field technology in House Atreides, long before the technology was introduced in the Dune universe — but if they had read the rest of the trilogy that question is fully explained and is, in fact, a major part of the story.

What? It wasn't resolved at all! They never explained away the no-room in GEoD being built thousands of years before the tech was invented, or how one guy invented something that would only be re-invented thousands of years later by an entire culture dedicated to science.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:A new (proper) movie would have generated orders of magnitude more interest in Dune than all their novels have combined to date.

And who cares about generating interest? If you want to write Dune 7, write Dune 7. Who cares if it doesn't sell a million copies? The goal is presumably to finish the Dune saga, not to "generate interest".

Superdog wrote:What? It wasn't resolved at all! They never explained away the no-room in GEoD being built thousands of years before the tech was invented, or how one guy invented something that would only be re-invented thousands of years later by an entire culture dedicated to science.

He probably meant its being forgotten/unknown; after all, everyone who knew about the McDune Harkonnen complex (Baron, Rabban, Piter?) is dead by the end of Dune. (The construction work team and inventor Chobyn himself are dead by the end of House Atrocious.) And the BG disassemble the no-ship used in the Heighliner attack, IIRC. (I forget how it ends up on their planet, though.)

And anyway, Chobyn was a Richesian; the later no-tech is Ixian.

Or was Chobyn working on a joint research project with a secret lab on Ix, with funding from the Guild? Or was that the alter-spice project?

Of course the real point is that it wasn't "thousands of years" later that the "real"/FH no-tech came along: it was only 500-600, at the very most 1000 years later when Leto built Dar-es-Balat.

KJA wrote:“Did we patronize Dune readers and ‘dumb down’ our writing so they could understand it?” No. That is the best we can do. That's us on a good day. I certainly don’t dumb down my writing because I think Dune readers are gullible and stupid. I just don't know how to write very well. I'm offended that you would accuse me of condescension and pandering when the problem is incompetence and pandering.

Frank’s style was different, and he often had a tendency to drop in major events 'offstage' without a lot of explanation or dramatization. And we can't figure out why he did that. We have tried to pack in as many plot events as possible, just short of making a list. How many times do we have to tell you: our universe is fucking huge!

Unfortunately, Talifans choose to ignore the things we tell them, and claim that Frank's universe has seemingly infinite depth, and that ours is flat and lame. Well, we have a different style, so we're doing this thing differently, and if that kind of thing is what gives you heartburn and keeps you up at night, then I’m sorry, my friend, but you need to get a life!

what a twat

One interesting aspect of that "dumming down" exchange for me is how he switched the focus from my "general reading public" to "Dune fans" in particular. My question was never about them "patronizing" Dune fans.

He's good. It's just a pity he's not that good when writing McDune.

SandChigger wrote:One interesting aspect of that "dumming down" exchange for me is how he switched the focus from my "general reading public" to "Dune fans" in particular. My question was never about them "patronizing" Dune fans.

He's good. It's just a pity he's not that good when writing McDune.

That's what writing is, careful consideration of phrasing. The exact opposite of how he approaches his books. See, he can do it. He's just too fucking lazy. As long as the books sell it doesn't matter to him if the product is quality or not. I guess he is a decent writer, just a shit storyteller.

SandChigger wrote:He's good. It's just a pity he's not that good when writing McDune.

I haven't read anything he's written other than some of the new Dune books. I would've thought that a person would throw everything they had into writing books that were going to follow Frank Herbert. But based solely on the new Dune books I've tried to read (House Harkonnen, House Atreides, Butlerian Jihad, Battle of Corrin, and the last straw - Paul of Dune), he doesn't seem to have any understanding of why Dune is good.

-- Captain Obvious

But McDune is the only thing by him that I've read, I guess I should point out.

Update: Everything except the email interview Q&A (which I'm going to put on their own page) is up now, including his bitchy response to my "Galavanting Paul" PoD question.

KaJaAh wrote:Rest assured, though, that Brian and I will keep writing the novels, and keep writing them, for as long as it takes until you are completely satisfied. You give us the incentive to keep the series going for many years to come.

So it's your fault. Man, that must weigh on you.

yeah well done chig!
thanks ever so much

And

Frank’s style was different, and he often had a tendency to drop in major events 'offstage' without a lot of explanation or dramatization. And we can't figure out why he did that. We have tried to pack in as many plot events as possible, just short of making a list. How many times do we have to tell you: our universe is fucking huge!

No shit? You don't understand so...
you pack in as many plot events as possible ??

How many times do we have to tell you
wishful thinking!

that's it my cyclothimic phase is set on hate again...
that guy is a real douchebag with the ego of a teenager that still wanks over the lingerie catalogue and has all that angst and frustration

He just wants to hurt people so he's not the only one suffering


EDIT
i just pwned myself
well done MM

Um, lotek, you might want to delete your last Twitter post, and check the original message on HToD: merkin was having a bit of fun above. Oops!

sunday morning haze...
it is so obvious this is the truth that I did fall for it, I mean we ALL know that is why they fucked everything up so why not admit it?
it was the next logical step for any normal person to admit not understanding but I forgot who we were dealing with here...

thanks for avoiding me further embarassment

lotek wrote:sunday morning haze...
it is so obvious this is the truth that I did fall for it, I mean we ALL know that is why they fucked everything up so why not admit it?
it was the next logical step for any normal person to admit not understanding but I forgot who we were dealing with here...

Yeah, well, I'm still searching for evidence to support my claim that Dune and Dune Messiah were written at the same time.

I wish KJA and BH had some kind of explanation for what they're doing to Dune, but then they would have to acknowledge that their writing is terrible. It seems like they genuinely don't realize how inadequate these new books are. I like that KJA defended Paul of Dune with one of the stupidest scenes from that book.

That stupid conversation between Paul and Irulan has got everything: it's boring, with a lot of obligatory dialogue;
neither of the characters are in any kind of jeopardy and, in fact, they seem to be speaking on behalf of the authors in a really bizarre way (as if they were admitting that they didn't give a shit about ruining the original Dune books);
it's got sentences like, "He frowned at her" and "He raised his eyebrows" to remind us that we are about as far away as we can get from the psychological depth of Frank's writing...

And then KJA is so self-righteous about his shitty writing: "Come on, at least TRY to look for an answer before railing about the books."
Well, thank you, Kevin, for giving me a little reminder of why I hate that book with that stupid scene with Irulan.

Again, I've never read anything else by Kevin J. Anderson, but judging from the new Dune books I don't see how this guy could've done much better, under any circumstances. The writing is so fundamentally bad that I just don't think he's capable of making a new Dune book interesting. They need to get somebody else. Brian can still put his name on it, but get somebody else in there.

Of course, that'll never happen. It would be nice if one of them would just say, "Look, it's obvious that we can't write, but we are able to read, for the most part, and we can admit that this is pretty bad. As a general rule, we don't like to read Frank's books while we're writing because it makes us drink lots of alcohol and we usually end up destroying Kevin's dictaphone." And it would also be nice if they wrote a new book that didn't suck, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

holy crap the scene between paul and irulan is for real??
nah you're trying to fool me again aren't you?

How could anyone (ANYONE!!) think for one second having such an inane dialogue explain anything?!

It's like that because one of the characters says so... don't be fooled by the fact that I the author put these words there, accept in universe fiction as a second level of reality: if a fictional character talks about a fictional history, then two minuses make a plus and it becomes suddenly more real than anything else before it.
I don't understand why you people have so much trouble with that concept!

merkin muffley wrote:Yeah, well, I'm still searching for evidence to support my claim that Dune and Dune Messiah were written at the same time.

FH: When I Was Writing Dune . . . wrote:Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed.