spring fever

[snow_wind]

Spring has finally arrived here in Japan. Huzzah

Comments

[loonylupinlover]

lolz, I <3 Dune. Then again it hits a couple major sci-fi kinks for me, namely ecology, prescience, and massive unavoidable destiny. But it's not a book about people so much as it is about figureheads (Herbert couldn't get you to feel personal emotions for these people at all), so there's that, too. If you need to actually identify with the people instead of just respecting them as godkings then yeah, Dune isn't gonna work for you. Normally I'm a characters-make-the-book kind of person, but sometimes the crushingly detailed and intriguing science will be more than enough and I don't need the characterization anymore. Anything by Asimov is like that -- fascinating logic puzzles with cardboard people, but damn are those puzzles good, you know?

[snow_wind]

I agree, the poor characterization was part of what made the book less than fun for me. I prefer to connect, even if it's just in a small way, with the characters. But I also had a problem with the story, because at a point a quarter to half way through the book, I knew how it would end. Not down to the last detail, mind you; but generally, I had the ending mapped out. It's not like Herbert was trying to make you think anything could happen either. So, the characters are virtually robots, and the story is an easily predictable sequence of events. The only thing to keep my interest was the exploration of the Dune universe, and the world that Herbert created - and it is a credit to that world that it held me through the rest of the book, given that I'd abandoned interest in the rest of its contents long ago. I found the entire setting and the different groups/cultures fascinating. But I just feel that if the only thing about the book that's keeping my attention is the setting, then it's not that fantastic

[loonylupinlover]

It's hard for me to judge if I would've guessed the ending because I'd been playing the ancient Dune computer game since I was 8 and had beaten it several times by the time I read the book, and the ending is the same if far less detailed, lol. As to the setting -- I feel the ecology was a character in itself and more than just a setting, though I'm also a bigass science nerd. It just wasn't human but it wasn't any less alive -- in fact it was even more alive than many human characters in many books often are. Shai-hulud is a character and so is the deep desert, in my mind.

I feel the other books have more interesting endings... I didn't even know the ending to the third book was POSSIBLE, in the universe, and so when it happened it's like "WTF, for reals?" and then becomes the 4th book which is cracked out. But I don't know you'll get that far, heh. You just have to give enormous weight to Arrakis to really enjoy the books.