God Emperor of DuneBook 4 of the Dune ChroniclesBy Frank HerbertA Dune Retrospective by Eric AllenWhat do you say about the book that was so completely terrible that it so turned you off of the series that you refused to read the four books that came after it for over a decade? This book is bad ...
Dune: The greatest SF novel of all time, never to be matched by later sequelsWhat more can be said about Frank Herbert’s 1965 masterpiece? This massive epic of political intrigue, messianic heroes, vile villains, invincible desert fighters, telepathic witches, sandworms and spice, guild pilots wh...
[Nota Bene: As Frank Herbert's last two published novels in the Dune series, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, along with the unwritten Dune 7, in fact comprise a single story that happened to be divided into three parts, I'll post the same review for both of the two published volumes. ...
Oh, Dune Messiah. We could've had it all. We could've had it all.2.5-3 stars. Reviewing this book is hard, because it has such an interesting foundation, and in theory, I feel like I should have loved it -- in practice, however, the execution falls short. It takes place 12 years after the events ...
In some ways, Heretics of Dune marks a significant departure from the previous installments in the Dune series. The plot is no longer focused on the Atreides family, but instead on the Bene Gesserit and its struggle for survival. Yet at the same time, it is a clear return to the original storytel...
This review won't make sense if you haven't read the book.The problem with this part of the Dune series is the fact that a classic has evolved into a family story without much of a plot. Riding on the comfort of knowing that most of his characters are already well-established and well-loved (I do...
_The Santaroga Barrier_ by Frank Herbert features an odd choice for a hero; Dr. Gilbert Dasein, a psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley, employed to do of all things a market study. Meyer Davidson, agent of a powerful investment corporation, one that owns a chain of retail st...
I wanted to give this book a low rating because the first 70 pages are painfully boring and unintelligible... on the first read and the ending is kind of blah... Nevertheless, it has some unbelievably redeeming qualities (if you're a Dune fanatic)... and I even suspect that these 70 pages might y...
I loved the Dune books when I was a teenager, and I know that Frank Herbert is an amazing writer. When I learned that the video game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri was inspired by The Jesus Incident, I thought I would like to read it. The library didn’t have it, but it did have the sequel, The Lazaru...
In this obscure science-fiction novel, written at about the same time as Dune, Frank Herbert asks a question which has occupied surprisingly few SF writers: if you were immortal, what would you actually do? His answer, which will appeal to many people on this site, is more or less that you would ...
Vor einigen hunderten Jahren begann eine Gruppe von Menschen den staatenbildenden Insekten nachzueifern und gründete - von der Umwelt vollkommen unbemerkt - einen Stock. Das Leben in diesem Stock ist für uns Menschen vollkommen unvorstellbar, denn es bedeutet die vollkommene Aufgabe jeglicher Ind...
Frank Herbert is of course best known for his science fiction epic Dune, arguably the bestselling science fiction book of all time. "The Heaven Makers" is about 1/3 the size of Dune, about 1/5 as complicated, and feels stylistically very much like a mass market sci-fi paperback, the kind of thing...
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I'll never know whether it was the homage as apology that prefaced this book which co...
THE CRYPTICAL ERUPTION "You tried to use him against me … and he still doesn't want you hurt. Is that not innocence?"In Soul Catcher, Katsuk and others make some very overt references to the struggle between Native Americans and white people in the past. This is his stated reason for sacrificing ...
Introduction to the novel would be something like this: A brilliant American Irish scientists is driven mad when his wife dies as a result of IRA bomb attack. So, he creates a virus that will kill all women on Ireland...Will the virus spread?There are a lot of fascinating themes in this novel and...
This books manages, despite significant flaws, to engagingly mix a golden age of sci-fi "engineers solving a technical problem" kind of plot with wild philosophizing and thriller elements.It rests on a somewhat wonky premise (I'm not spoiling anything btw - the following is all revealed early on)...
I didn't hate it, like everyone else seemed to have.It is possible that there are a lot of people out there who don't understand one of the primary roles of SciFi: to tell a story about the future that teaches a lesson. In this case, the lesson was about the dangers of isolationism to the point o...
The attraction of SF books is that they are like telescopes, looking at some point into the far future. They aren't hemmed in by the here and now, instead, in that tiny piece of glass at the very end, you get to see myriad possibilities tinted with a hint of reality, with some futures, of course,...