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Only started reading this thread recently and haven't posted in it yet, but I love the SFL Archives and ended up going back and reading more of the thread just to read more of the archives. I've been reading a lot of pulp magazines and older novels that spun out of the pulp magazines lately which has been getting me caught up with a lot of the older big name books and authors who I'd seen referenced a lot but never really read their stuff much, it's nice to see them get mentioned in passing in some of those posts.quantumfoam posted:Yes. The Asimov stuff in SFL Archives Volume 10 is legitimately unsettling. I got a MZB book from a used bookstore recently that had a Gorn on the cover (with some other scifi guys), it is basically the movie Predators except with expy scifi novel franchise characters, then googled the author to find out why I hadn't really heard of her and wow was not expecting that revelation. StrixNebulosa posted:I literally can't bring up the series ANYWHERE on the internet without being warned about the porn so yeah I know. I'm looking forward to it!!! I really like Merry Gentry too, LKH writes really good character drama and mixes it with horror and noir stuff excellently. There are a bunch of Laurell K Hamilton posts in r/hobbydrama which are fun reads. When the Anita Blake books were getting big I was living in Missouri and as she's from St. Louis they had tons of free copies of like the first third of one of her novels they were giving away at different bookstores, I think I ended up with three or four copies
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Sep 4, 2020 12:41
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Arcsquad12 posted:Anyone have some recommendations for SF novels following Generation Ships? I had a recent thought about a premise where a Generation ship sets off for a new solar system but in the proceeding centuries faster travel methods have allowed ships to make it there before the initial ship so they send someone to pick up the original colony mission and get them there hundreds of years ahead of schedule. I figure someone must have done a story like that already and I'd be interested to see how it played out. This is on my to-read pile so dunno if it is good but The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany quote:A dozen slow, multi-generation ships were sent to a distant star system called the Leffer System. Soon afterwards, mankind developed a star drive, so that by the time the ships reached their destination, mankind had been traveling around the galaxy for a hundred years. Of the dozen ships, two arrived empty, and two others never arrived at all. The ships were simply parked in orbit, and abandoned. Beta-2, one of the ships, even has its own ballad. Years later, as a college assignment, Joneny, a young researcher, is sent to find out just what happened. you might have to hunt in used books stores or get lucky at Goodwill like I did
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Sep 12, 2020 01:42
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quantumfoam posted:A new SFL Archives readthrough summary is up, no idea anymore how long it will take before finishing off SFL Archives Vol 11 or how many more readthrough update posts will be required. quote:-A weird bit of SciFi pulp fiction creeps out. In 1948 or early 1949, a anonymous person sent in a fake review of the upcoming October or November 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, complete with author & story title listing. John W. Campbell bit, and low-key contacted the authors listed in that fake review ASF review and had them write SciFi stories using those story titles, and then published everything listed in that fake review. JW Campbell then used that gag as a editorial hook-line about how Science Fiction can become a Self-Fulfilling prophecy. That is the November 1949 Astounding Science Fiction, the letter by Richard A. Hoen is in the November 1948 issue
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Sep 19, 2020 10:45
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Tias posted:Sooo I really enjoyed Old Man's War and Forever War, am a huge warhams 40k grog and couldn't get into Expanse or Culture. What should I read, new thread? The Lost Fleet series might be up your alley. Diminishing returns on the sequel series but I still love them. Great fleet battles and no chud politics.
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Oct 8, 2020 08:05
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The Goblin Corps by Ari Marmell was dumb fun following a band of villains around and it didn't have a sequel last time I checked
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Oct 16, 2020 20:53
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Baru shoutout on Tor https://www.tor.com/2020/10/21/9-complicated-female-narrators-who-will-surprise-you/
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Oct 22, 2020 05:44
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As per the mech books posting a few pages back, one of the people I follow on twitter (Xiran Jay Zhao) has a 2021 book coming out that's pitched as quote:Iron Widow
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Nov 2, 2020 21:43
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Ccs posted:Huh, a girl I went to highschool with got a book published this year called Rebelwing, with Chinese characters piloting mecha. Otherwise the similarities aren't that big but I wonder if they know about each other. I don't know of too many other books about mecha. I just checked and they are twitter mutuals, and that lead me to find Axie Oh who wrote the Rebel Seoul series which is another mecha series now on my to-read list
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Nov 3, 2020 21:23
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I have never gotten into GoodReads but even when I search for books now the site comes up and just looks barbaric. I did read an article complaining that there isn't a viable alternative and that there probably won't be because Amazon owns GoodReads and for anyone else to compete with that will require a huge amount of work/capital just to keep it updated. I think some of that could be done with scripts but still a big hurdle to get going.StrixNebulosa posted:https://twitter.com/EssaHansen/status/1328840026730373120 ToxicFrog posted:
The landing is entirely consistent with the way the series is written, even if it seems like parts of it were really rushed and certain major characters just get mentioned as casualties in a battle. I did like the new book even though it sort of blew all the established canon away (or remixed it!), but that's also sort of consistent with the books just being the biased logs of whoever the narrator is, who often freely admit things are embellished and will rag on prior authors for not explaining things correctly. Part of the appeal is the original crew being featured again, or at least not so old they are invalid. I can fully understand why people wouldn't like it.
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Nov 18, 2020 21:58
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Sounds horrible https://twitter.com/KMSzpara/status/1329153117242470402
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Nov 18, 2020 22:16
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quantumfoam posted:-David Brin being revealed as having utterly garbage (Harlan Ellison style) behavior towards women at conventions since at least the mid 1980s. Why it took until 2019 for that behavior by David Brin to be outed publicly is baffling. I blame the SFWA. Curious if you've seen any stories of people with bad behavior there that haven't been publicly outed
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Nov 22, 2020 00:58
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Cline's been trying to do that for years. He DMCAed a bunch of stuff related to his creepy poems years ago, and before that I found out he namesearched when he started liking tweets I made bashing him within minutes. Spielberg giving him legitimacy is darkest timeline stuff
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Nov 27, 2020 06:07
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quantumfoam posted:1989 SFL also got around to discussing Diane Duane's Star Trek Vulcan books and they sound extremely fan-servicey, especially that multi-talented immortal crystalline spider thing... no longer wondering why Star Trek fans hated McIntyre's Star Trek books that rejected Trek fan-service in favor of direct feedback from Roddenberry/other ST producers/TOS actors. The Rihannsu stuff exploded the Romulans in popularity, there is a whole section of Trek books that is just Romulan story after Romulan story, made since they'd do a Vulcan version (there was also a Klingon version that got jettisoned after TNG but some of it pops up in Discovery iirc) There were too many Romulan stories imho, but TOS only has a few bad guys to pick from. I liked Vonda McIntyre's expanded movie novels as I love when novels add tons of extra stuff, why not fill pages/take advantage of the medium? I think I read her non-movie Trek novel when I was a kid but don't remember it at all, haven't read her newer stuff. The novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is "written" by Gene Roddenberry, and is gross horny as hell. Written in quotes due to debate on how much he wrote, either he only wrote the horny parts or the ghost writer knew exactly how horny he was
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Dec 7, 2020 02:15
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Leng posted:Some Amazon discount fairy must be listening! Guess that's what I'm reading next. I liked it a lot but haven't had time to get to the sequel yet
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Jan 14, 2021 00:19
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Stuporstar posted:This is wise I follow Kuang on twitter and after the third book (which I haven't had time to read yet) there were a ton of retweets from everyone traumatized by reading it.
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Jan 18, 2021 09:51
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Selachian posted:If I remember correctly, Del Arroz was blackballed from Worldcon because he announced he was going to wear a body camera and try to get into as many private parties/events as he could in hopes of catching prominent SFers saying or doing inappropriate things. I checked out his twitter and it's chud all the way down - comicsgate, qanon, complaining about twitter purges, youtube rants, complaining about censorship, those dastardly SJWs always after him In YA news, the wife of the male astronaut from the diaper astronaut event is a YA paranormal romance writer and publishing editor who apparently was posting bad stuff on Parler/Gab and just got fired from the editing job
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Jan 27, 2021 00:21
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An unfortunately paywalled article (easy to get around) about the late Charles Saunders, who created black heroes in pulp jungle novels https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/books/charles-saunders-dead.html
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Jan 28, 2021 09:01
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MockingQuantum posted:Opinions differ on this, but I actually think The Expanse books get worse as they go on. I quit maybe 4 or 5 books in because I felt like they abandoned some of the more genuinely interesting plot points and shifted focus to the least interesting aspects of the main characters. It might have gotten better after I quit but I haven't really heard anyone singing the praises of the later books in particular. This is true, Cibola Burn (#4) just piles on extra complications for the characters that don't seem organic to the story of weird stuff on the world waking up and settler drama, the world is largely empty and the alien machines are barely mentioned which makes the planet seem lame even though they do have a few interesting bits in there. Also lol at the dumb plot of the character in love with Holden for no reason. Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes (5 and 6) are okay but the ending seems to just happen because the books were running out of pages. They also set up the next two books, but that often gets in the way of what is happening in the current books and it isn't the plot that has been promised since the first few books with finding out what killed off the aliens that made the gates. Also everyone is old now that they had to push things ahead just to have the characters around for the plot. Supposedly the next two books are the last but dump trucks full of money might keep upping the numbers. I'll still keep reading them because at this point I want to see what happens in the end but I already am prepared to be disappointed
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Feb 10, 2021 21:34
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Sounds cool, I forget where I dropped off with Shadows of the Apt but the first 4 or 5 were good iirc
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Feb 22, 2021 22:47
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Groke posted:A fine old classic, pity it never had any sequels despite that teasing end. My high school had a science-fiction literature class and it was one of the books we read in it
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Feb 25, 2021 17:56
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Re: Star Trek books, this is a good site doing a reread of all of them, is a great walk down memory lane for a bunch of stuff I read 20-25 years ago - http://deepspacespines.com/ Modern stuff I checked out after the relaunch as I got behind and always meant to get back but never did. I did read some of the side series and probably would have read the Discovery and Picard novels had corona not happened to disrupt when and how I read to make it more older pulp stuff I grabbed off the internet instead of books I saw while at the bookstore/library
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Mar 5, 2021 01:15
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Same, I've only read the first three and Player of Games just seemed very generic, like something out of the old pulp magazines I read sprinkled with Culture bits. Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons were way better (even if I guessed a major plot point in the latter, it didn't matter because it was told well) They were okay but I wasn't super wowed with them and need to read the next ones immediately, but I probably will some day since they've been sitting in my iPad for years.
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Mar 8, 2021 02:49
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Looking it up online finds that it ended due to either a gross poem that saw the author assaulted by her father or her having a pushy stage mom that she got sick of (or both) but she went back to being a normal teen.quantumfoam posted:
In one of the stories in Planet Stories I read, a teen girl is aged up to over 18 via an aging ray and thus is now available for the adult main character to date her. This was either the 40s or 50s but was the grossest thing in the issue from a time when gross or racist stuff isn't uncommon Tars Tarkas fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Mar 21, 2021 |
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Mar 21, 2021 23:41
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My addiction to bestiaries led me to pull the trigger on this one, it rules
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Mar 22, 2021 00:33
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Anyone got a trip report on Stealing Thunder by Alina Boyden?pradmer posted:The Viscount and the Witch (Riyria Chronicles) by Michael J Sullivan - FREE !!!
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Mar 31, 2021 22:19
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quantumfoam posted:Please stop replying to the thread troll, thanks in advance.
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Apr 8, 2021 20:38
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Ccs posted:Hello thread, so I have a book out, Order of the Magi! It’s free to grab this weekend on Amazon. Thread regular Leng was a beta-reader for it and seemed to like it, and I've since tightened it up based on their suggestions, so it should be a brisk and enjoyable read. Congrats! Picked this up to read at a time when the baby isn't teething Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:As the perpetual reminder of "why did you/don't loving do that" happens to writers often, today's episode is brought to you by Lauren Hough, who became the main character on writer twitter by bitching about good goodreads reviews for some reason. I'm somehow already blocked on twitter by this person I don't remember interacting with at all, based on the other tweets I'm guessing I mocked them for some terrible neoliberal take
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Apr 18, 2021 20:01
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DurianGray posted:I'm also about 3/4s through I, Robot (have been for a while, I need to just finish it already) and was honestly expecting the sexism to be much worse from what I've heard about Asimov. Granted, it's still pretty bad! But it's more patronizing type sexism than anything. It's also a good thing that it's all short stories, because I really don't think I could sustain my interest in that writing style if it were something longer. My high school had a Science Fiction class and I, Robot was one of the books. We also had to memorize the three laws of robotics and write them exactly on quizes, to the point where every weekly quiz/test had that as a question and it was free points once you remembered where all the commas went. We also read Caves of Steel, so it was pretty Asimov heavy. (other books were Slan, A Princess of Mars, Rendezvous with Rama, some short stories I don't remember beyond that Jack London story where they germ warfare china, and probably more books but I can't remember any others)
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May 11, 2021 22:11
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Finally had time to start reading the Murderbot novellas and them being short is great when I'm still dealing with a baby who likes to stay up until I have barely enough focus to read. Not feeling The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet yet but going to push through to 100 pages before I give up on it as it should be exactly the kind of thing I love and most of my problems are just minor quibbles. Hope I'm not just being too picky now because usually I'm too forgiving and I like that better as I get to read more fun trash The Glumslinger posted:Oh and for the love of god, skip Port of Shadows. I am pretty sure Port of Shadows will make more sense when we get the other book as there has to be a bunch of time travel body possession shenanigans going on, but until then it reads more like alt universe fanfic
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May 21, 2021 07:48
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If you want an actual trucker driving a truck in space, the Skyway series by John DeChancie has that.
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Jun 1, 2021 22:43
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Ok serious space trucker recs as I had to look some of these up. Some of these are IP related and a few I haven't read the whole series yet The Han Solo Trilogy by A. C. Crispin - the classic, is retro but familiar at the same time as it isn't burdened by sequels, prequels, or a sprawling book series canon. Spawned the prequel series about Lando (which is ok but written by a libertarian and some of that sneaks in) There's also an RPG module of the trilogy if you like to read sourcebooks like I do (and be sure to track down the Tramp Freighter sourcebook as that is literally this genre in Star Wars RPG form) Vatta's War series by Elizabeth Moon - Lady from a shipping magnate family kicked out of Space Academy, becomes a trucker for her family's business. More serious and galactic politics pops up. I haven't finished the series. Inherit the Stars by tony peak - space salvager lady on a quest chilling effect by valerie valdes - space truckers, kidnappings, psychic cats fortuna series by kristyn merbeth - space smugglers, galactic war, suddenly we are a space opera like most of these modern ones turn into. I have not read past book 1. Maybe pile: Terminal Alliance series by Jim Hines - space janitors! They don't go around trucking though, just learning how to operate a ship, defeat feral humans, and bust open galactic conspiracies. It's like one in spirit Guardians Of The Galaxy: Rocket Raccoon And Groot Steal The Galaxy! by Dan Abnett - okay they space truck for about 10 pages before the plot happens and they are defending a robot from an evil corporation, and it's another existing property. But it's Dan Abnett and a fast fun read.
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Jun 2, 2021 06:30
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I picked up Bug Wars from this thread mentioning it too, if I had heard of it when I was younger I would have snatched it up then. It's next to read after Order of the Magi
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Jul 11, 2021 02:08
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Ccs posted:Tor is offering Charlie Jane Ander's newest book for free today only as part of their book club. I enjoyed that author's previous book All The Birds in the Sky fair enough, though it got a bit weird at the end, and I didn't enjoy it enough to check out their next book The City in the Middle of the Night. But can't argue with free! Thanks, i had signed up for the book club ages ago for another free book but it was on one of my spam accounts so I'd miss a limited offer like this otherwise. Don't know if I'll like it, it seems like a book I'd like but I'm not 100% jazzed on the author, but it's free so worth a shot, worst it can do is I close the tab 50 pages in
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Jul 21, 2021 19:04
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Echoing the sentiment of more advertising, that's how I find the stuff I read, which can be both very good or very dumb or very both. I already have a folder full of epubs I need to put on my reader and a reader full of books and a Kindle account full of books (partially due to deals posted in this thread) and many many boxes full of books, with no time for any of them, but I need more books. So give me more!Ccs posted:I gotta admit that, despite being a self-published author, Finished your book a few days ago but didn't have time to mention it until now, it was great, please write the sequel. I left an Amazon review which almost I never do thanks to extreme laziness.
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Aug 10, 2021 07:44
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Pages late but another way outside of the many listed to find diverse authors is to just follow a few on Twitter as they'll retweet many others into your timeline and you'll suddenly have a gigantic list of books in your to-read list that won't even be published for years beyond all the ones that are. (and yes there is a cadre of crazy alt-right scifi/fantasy/horrow authors who do the same thing and if you aren't careful and follow a few pulp book randos one or two might suddenly retweet a bunch of them into your timeline. ) Twitter is trash though I don't recommend it
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Aug 15, 2021 12:01
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Spotted at Barnes & Nobles in San Mateo
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Aug 25, 2021 22:13
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Urcher posted:Pyramids is a great standalone Discworld book. If you are curious about Discworld but not sure where to start this is a great one for dipping your toes in to see if you like it. Thanks, grabbed this too, I picked up book #1 a few days ago and they keep dropping more on sale but didn't want to spend money even as deals if i wasn't going to like them, hopefully will have time to get to it soon, there have been a ton of good scifi/fantasy books the past week or so on sale.
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Aug 29, 2021 05:25
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Dune rules but every book after declines in quality, feel no guilt about hitting a point when you check out of the series for good but enjoy as much as you can. I've lost count of how many there are now that the son is pumping them out and I think one is coming out this month too
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Sep 8, 2021 17:47
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Heretics of Dune was a chore to work through for me and I never finished much of Chapterhouse Dune. That was 20+ years ago but I don't think my opinion would change much. My friend who is Dune obsessed liked all six but hate read the books by the son until they got to bad even he couldn't stand to read them. I picked up the parody book Doon from a used shop years ago but haven't tried to read it.
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Sep 9, 2021 00:46
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