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andrew smash posted:I'm always impressed at the variety of impressions the series makes on people who generally agree that the first book is great. Heretics is my favorite in the series after Dune. I'm like 40 pages from the end of it so won't read any response just yet, but I'd be curious to hear your impressions of Heretics. I could see liking it despite it not feeling very Dune-like, combined with not liking books 2-4, making you rank it 2nd behind Dune.
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Aug 26, 2016 10:43
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andrew smash posted:I'm always impressed at the variety of impressions the series makes on people who generally agree that the first book is great. Heretics is my favorite in the series after Dune. Alright, finished Heretics, so here are a few scattered thoughts: The tone and setting was just so different. Herbert spent time describing people finding old junker cars and refurbishing them, characters walking around through much more stereotypical scifi settings on Gammu, running and gunning with laser guns. This ridiculously long-winded passage bothered me a lot for some reason, just so repetitive and inconsequential and poorly written: quote:This room, about five meters long and four wide, was a place for doing very high-level business. The merchandise would never be an actual exposure of money. People here would see only portable equivalents of whatever passed for currency—melange, perhaps, or milky soostones about the size of an eyeball, perfectly round, at once glossy and soft in appearance but radiant with rainbow changes directed by whatever light fell on them or whatever flesh they touched. This was a place where a danikin of melange or a small fold-pouch of soostones would be accepted as a natural occurrence. The price of a planet could be exchanged here with only a nod, an eyeblink or a low-voiced murmur. No wallets of currency would ever be produced here. The closest thing might be a thin case of translux out of whose poison-guarded interior would come thinner sheets of ridulian crystal with very large numbers inscribed on them by unforgeable dataprint. The Teleilaxu were set up as ultimate villains, with some secret strategy going back thousands of years, for the first quarter or half of the book, and I thought that would be something really interesting. Then Waff, the Masters of Masters, ends up being some dumb schlub that gets outmaneuvered easily by typical Bene Gesserit religious manipulation, and the new ultimate Face Dancers can be detected easily anyway. The Bene Gesserit go from being super wise and completely controlled to completely ruled by their emotions; anytime the Matres are mentioned, any BG in hearing has to exclaim "whores!" It's ridiculous and not at all fitting, imo. Teg apparently became the Flash + prescient because he got tortured; maybe this gets explained at all in Chapterhouse? The focus on sexual stuff was done really poorly, with the Duncan Idaho scene with the Honored Matre being really in stark contrast to how Herbert handled sex in any previous book. Again, the way they set up the Tleilaxu breeding something into the gholas sounded like it might have an interesting reveal. But I guess they just wanted him to be a sex god? And him getting the memories of all the previous gholas made him a sex god??? That that is the entire premise of the Honored Matres was also dumb. It could have been handled as something interesting, like harnessing the unconscious species-wide drive to procreate and warping it somehow to the destruction of humanity, sort of an anti-God Emperor thing, but Herbert just didn't put any effort into that. He sorted of dropped hints that that was what he had in mind, I think, but that was it, and it isn't clear how being sex gods individually relates to that. There were other little things that didn't make sense or get resolved (why were Odrade and Lucilla bred to look very similar, what was the point of Duncan being imprinted to an Ordrade lookalike?), but I think that's probably true in the earlier books as well. Anyway, I'm glad I finally read it, and I'm going to hit Chapterhouse next. I just honestly don't really see how the KJA/post-Frank books will be much "worse", in the sense of being like any other poorly written generic scifi book. Like there's some Butlerian Jihad prequel book(s), right? Besides being more poorly written, I suspect it'll feel as much like Dune as Heretics did for me.
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Aug 26, 2016 14:09
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Strom Cuzewon posted:There's only a few people who don't like it, but those fuckers are obnoxiously vocal with their criticisms, and will swan into the thread to rant the minute someone posts something in Malazan's favour. Lol ShutteredIn posted:Malazan is really bad and 20,000 pages too long. But yeah, this
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Sep 1, 2016 22:09
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mcustic posted:I loved the bit when Sephirot did cool things with the sword and the chase across the desert. I think Memories of Ice was really, really good, the other few books at the beginning of the series were interesting . But I lost it somewhere around Reaper's Gale, when another set of interchangeable marines got sent to another newly revealed godforsaken continent. The truth being, Malazan has some very good moments, but may not be for everyone. Hell, I agree with this whole post. Strom Cuzewon posted:(About half my posts in this thread have been semi - hysterical rants about how much I hate Malazan) This made me check your post history and I saw your posts 2 years ago about Dune, right now I'm trying to get through Chapterhouse and finish the whole thing finally. Heretics almost killed me, and I'm slowing down so much in Chapterhouse, but dammit I'm going to finish this garbage. I similarly try to read the last Malazan book once a year or so after reading through book 9 a long time ago, but I just can't do it. If they were all just a respectable 400-500 pages like the awful volumes of Dune, I could power through, but no luck 
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Sep 1, 2016 22:42
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Strategic Tea posted:Well now I want to read it Yeah, that was a nice read, though I'm still not sure I buy it as more than a post-hoc explanation for/reading too much into a muddy, unplanned world (e.g., all the "philosophy of the Matrix" stuff).
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Sep 2, 2016 13:48
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fritz posted:Didn't Malazan start out as a RPG whose group included Erickson and Esslemont? Yes
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Sep 2, 2016 15:16
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Darth Walrus posted:Remember that Erikson's a professional anthropologist. The structure of his fantasy world being based on anthropological theory ain't such a huge stretch. Yeah, that's totally fair. And just to be clear, I wasn't being snarky at all, that really was a compelling read, and it does make me question whether there was a coherent thing going on (vs being sure there was not!).
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Sep 2, 2016 16:58
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Asher doesn't seem anywhere near deplorable enough for me personally to hold his politics or personal life against him (no advocating mass murder or pedophilia or whatever) from what I've read in this thread, but I couldn't get through Gridlinked and was not at all hooked by Spatterjay (though it was definitely a step up from Gridlinked) so didn't keep going with him. Maybe I'll try another of his books eventually, but I think it's ok to look a little poorly on his writing just on its own merits, even if in other of his novels it's some particularly poorly written political stuff that's a turn off. It's possible to write interesting and thoughtful works that do paint one viewpoint in a better light than another, just like it's possible to write Atlas Shrugged. I'm happy to read the former even if I don't agree with the author, and disliking the latter isn't some knock on my willingness to read work that doesn't perfectly match my own views. Now I'll go back to reading Chapterhouse Dune that I've made it like halfway through in 2.5 weeks 
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Sep 12, 2016 19:33
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Whoa, unspeakable southern Italians and jabbering French Canadians. English and/or German Protestants the only acceptable races??
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Sep 13, 2016 01:24
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