Other SF writers?

Kerry Benton · 14 May 2008, 22:11 · from 2008-May.txt.gz

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From: k.benton at gmail.com (Kerry Benton)
Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 18:11:11 -0400
Subject: (urth) Other SF writers?
In-Reply-To: <BAY101-W44AFD7175B8D319AADFA14D8CF0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY101-W44AFD7175B8D319AADFA14D8CF0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <9f1507fc0805141511x3b3e0d74ha1c4ef036af2f3e6 at mail.gmail.com>

Heartily!

Dune's one of my very favorite books.  As noted, the subsequent books
fall off in quality.  I rank Children and Messiah as "decent", and God
Emperor, Heretics and Chapterhouse as varying levels of "readable",
all more or less on a geometrically declining quality scale.  This is
of course is not including the latter day sins of Chris Herbert...
those books are dross on a whole other scale (exponential!) ranging
from awful to totally unreadable.  And I was so excited when I first
heard of the first one.  Bleh.

Anyway, Dune's got that very complete feeling in the universe Herbert
constructs.  I love the small glimpses of the extended society.  It's
depth that's not plumbed as much as alluded to, but I find it rounds
everything out, and creates a more perfect experience, in much the
same way that the best meals have some not quite graspable character
of *completeness*, above the mere agglomeration of materials and
application of varying levels of heat.

This is true of all my favorite works, though I guess I have a
fondness for epics precisely because inhabiting well constructed,
genuine-feeling worlds is so satisfying.  This is Tolkein's draw as
well.

-k

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Oliver Wakefield
<radontrooper at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Thats why I moved to sci-fi really. I can't say ive read that much yet. Dune
> is what i'm going to read next. Does anyone reccomend it?

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