Kevin J. Anderson

As promised in my review for the second installment in this rather comatose adaptation, I did indeed buy the last volume hoping (vainly) that it might improve.

This is the worst of the lot. The art this time around didn't even try to swing for the fences. An attempt would have been appreciated. Instead, we get 190 pages of dull, static people standing around, stiffly jumping or supposedly fighting, and lots of close ups of mostly dull expressions. For a book with the main title "DUNE" we get show more very little imagery of the greater world, and what we do get is boring.

So, dull, uninteresting, workmanlike art that has no place in an epic story as grand and challenging as DUNE.

But worse than the art is the writing by the man that proves that, on occasion, the apple can fall exceptionally far from the tree, then just keep rolling farther and farther away. Frank Herbert was a very cerebral, very distinctive author and, for a kid who apparently grew up hearing his father read his stories, he absorbed nothing of his father's careful cadence or storytelling ability. I've called the art workmanlike. But the writing? I think the only word that works here is "inept".

Oh sure, he knows all the terms. He knows all the characters. But where Frank would have subtle, mysterious conversations that bent and twisted with subterfuge and hidden meaning, Brian's got Paul just bellowing, "I'm the Kwisatz Haderach!" for all and sundry, like he's freaking Kanye West. The dialogue is stunted and choppy and dull, the pacing terrible. He's wrung the book through an old dirty sock and filtered out all that was fun and awe-inspiring and wondrous about DUNE and instead just strung a series of words and sentences along to barely hint at one of the most incredible stories of the 20th century.

This is awful. I've tried and tried to read something with Brian Herbert's name attached to it, but with this last garbage money grab, I'm officially done. This was crap.

Go read the book. Leave these adaptations in the washroom where the paper will get better use. show less

Once upon a time, a magic book called the Necronomicon got unwittingly invoked, and death went a little sideways in an event dubbed the Big Uneasy. The result is a hilarious urban fantasy series populated by zombies, ghosts, mummies, ghouls, witches, werewolves, and other paranormal creatures.

Private investigator Dan Chambeaux had already set up a practice in the Unnatural Quarter with lawyer Megan Deyer before he got shot in the head. But death isn't slowing down this zombie PI! He's show more determined to solve his own murder, the murder of his true love (who is now a ghost), as well as catch up on Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations' case load. With the Straight Edgers group out to end all non-humans, the demand for experienced investigations and litigation amongst Unnaturals is booming.

Anderson's writing is full of puns, allusions, dark humour, and witty buffoonery. Red herrings swim through all the multiple cases Dan tracks. If you are looking for a serious urban fantasy PI series, that knows how to not take itself seriously, the Dan Shamble, Zombie PI series is a winner! The world building is fun, suspenseful, and interesting. Gigante's narration is an added bonus. show less

After reading Sandworms of Dune, I can finally set down the entire Dune Chronicles. I read The Legends of Dune trilogy, The Houses of Dune trilogy, Frank Herbert’s original 6 volumes in the Dune Chronicles and the concluding two volumes by his son and Kevin Anderson. This was a reading project that took me a couple of years to complete. I was unimpressed by Legends, found Houses to be entertaining, the original Dune is still a classic and the next four to be worth reading. FH’s last show more volume, Chapterhouse Dune was not as good though it ended on a very interesting note that I wish (as many others do) that he had been able to follow up on it. The last two volumes, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune by BH and KJA were a slog to read - I found them frustrating.

So what annoyed me in Sandworms? The colonial attitude that the universe is for humans to do with as they wish without thought of other lifeforms. Resources are there to be used by humanity. I also found this attitude to be extended to women which was odd as women think of each other as resources to use both in breeding programs and as axlotl tanks.

Axlotl tanks! What an abhorrent idea. In the Houses trilogy and in the first couple of volumes of Frank’s original Dune books, the idea of using women simply as incubators was treated as something awful. By Sandworms, it had become normalized and offered sort of like a career choice to women. What a sad thing to suggest and it made no sense to continue with the technique. Using the axlotl tanks to resurrect characters long dead because they had special properties that might help humanity defeat the thinking machines sort of made sense when the thinking machines were a threat. But at the end of Sandworms, there has been a reconciliation between human and machine. What is the point if dehumanizing women to simply be incubators. Once the threat was removed this abhorrent technology should have been completed dismantled. It made no sense to me that it should continue.

And at the end of Sandworms the Bene Gesserit breeding program is apparently going to continue? Why? That also makes no sense! The BG breeding program had as its goal to produce the Kwisatz Haderach but by the end of Sandworms, the BG have committed to not producing another KH. So what is the point of continuing the breeding program? Why is it assumed in the book that this sort of positive eugenics is a good thing? Something that kept coming up in the books is how prescience and controlling the future becomes boring and static and that what makes life worth living is being surprised. A breeding program tries to avoid surprises - the point is to control what offspring are produced. This did not make sense to me that it should continue.

I did not like the appearance of an ultimate Kwisatz Haderach. What made the idea of a KH interesting was that the individual would be uniquely gifted and that they were the result of careful breeding. But now it seems in Sandworms that KHs are all over the place and can be engineered by ghola engineering. The KH is no longer unique and became, for me, a boring concept even though at the end of Heretics of Dune, Frank Herbert did something really interesting with Miles Teg. But the character - the idea - didn’t develop well for me in subsequent novels.

I also did not appreciate how the Dune Chronicles ends with the other memory of the BG referred to as racial memory. I thought other memory was supposed to be something developed in humanity and not localized to a particular race.

Finally, at the end of Sandworms, there is supposed to be a great rapprochement between thinking machines and humans. But the ultimate KH gives the homeworld of the thinking machines to humans to do with as they see fit. Humans yet again get to colonize a world that was not theirs to begin with. And then, “thinking machines” are simply used by humans as workers to rehabilitate/terraform/rehabilitate worlds inhabited by humans. But there is no sense that these machine “partners” with humanity are given any agency. If they are thinking machines don’t they have their own goals/dreams/aspirations?

Very disappointing end to something that had such auspicious beginnings in the original Dune. show less

I was really bummed out by the news of the recent death of Neil Peart. I've said more than once that seeing Peart performing one of his extended virtuoso percussion solos live is the closest thing I've had to a religious experience, and that's only very slightly hyperbolic. It certainly wouldn't be at all hyperbolic to call it a transcendent experience.

So I was sort of wondering what I might do in memoriam, when I remembered I still had this volume sitting on my TBR shelves. And picking up a show more book seemed like a fitting way to pay tribute to a member of a band known for retiring to their hotel rooms to read while the other rock stars partied.

This anthology is pretty much exactly what the title says it is: stories inspired by various Rush songs, including both big hits and deep cuts. It also includes the story "A Nice Morning Drive" by Richard S. Foster, which directly inspired the song "Red Barchetta," and "Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber, which apparently was a vague and half-forgotten inspiration for "Roll the Bones."

I'll be honest, there are maybe three or four stories in here that I'd remotely describe as "good," and that's if you include the Fritz Leiber piece, which was written in 1967, and whose imaginative writing and fascinating weirdness are seriously marred by a couple of gratuitous racial slurs that felt like sudden and awful slaps across the face. Only one of them, Greg van Eekhout's "On the Fringes of the Fractal" (which I'd actually already encountered somewhere before, but which was worth re-reading), truly stands out. And even that one has a slightly weak ending.

The rest of them vary quite a bit in quality, but in general they're just... not terribly well-written. And yet, I did find the collection as a whole a bit more enjoyable than it seems to me that it objectively deserves. I'm sure some of that is me being in a forgiving and nostalgic mood. But I was also genuinely impressed by how even most of the weaker stories approached the subject matter. I more than half expected that we'd get a lot of pieces that read like novelizations of some of the more story-like songs, of which there are certainly plenty to choose from. But all of the authors put some real creativity into the assignment, and almost all of them gave us stories that have clear connections to the songs but build something unexpected on top of them. And even if I didn't think the results were always that great, I found that interesting enough to keep me fairly engaged. Mostly. show less