[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by EatingPie

A thread that beats me to the punch on BOTH books I was going to list!

Who keeps saying "or just not written the first book at all"?

I liked the series and characters enough to make it to the middle of 9, where 100s of pages are spent on describing walking through the snow. Then I heard God stepped in and said "enough is enough" and whisked Mr. Jordan away.

I've made it through all of them thus far. I'm jus debating whether to do a re-read of the earlier books before attempting the completion.

But even God doesn't get the last laugh. The guy who took over the last book is now turning it into three books!

Yes, he blogged about it. He's dealing with some fundamental issues of how long you can make a single pbook.

He originally estimated the completion of Jordan's last book would be about 250,000 works. As he did a careful read of the prior books and the partial manuscript and notes Jordan left behind, he realized it would take a lot more to properly deal with various characters, deal with critical story arcs, and finish the story. The splitting decision was mostly on Tor's side, motivated by production concerns, with Tor CEO Tom Doherty saying "Do you have 250,000 words that can stand alone as an installment that we can publish as the next book in the series sooner rather than later?" The answer, after some editing and fiddling, became the upcoming release.

I believe Dune Messiah inspired Robert Jordan. Two million pages on walking into a throne room, when the book itself is only two hundred pages!

Dune Messiah wasn't that bad, but it doesn't really stand alone.

Anyway, the badness of Dune Messiah has obviously been mis-ascribed. It was a terrible book, plain and simple... nothing at all to do with it being a middle-of-the-trilogy (infinite-ology). See Empire Strikes Back as proof that that's no excuse.

Since I don't think Star Wars has aged well, and I consider some parts execrable (like The Phantom Menace), I'll avoid using that as a comparison.

I have never been able to understand Herbert. He wrote one absolutely astounding work of science fiction. And every single follow-up, including Children of Doom, was not just bad, but absolutely horrible. How did he do that? (I'm even more shocked to hear that Messiah and Children were part of Dune originally.... I find that super hard to believe because the quality drops off so heavily.)

-Pie

Have you read Herbert's _Under Pressure_? (Also published as The Dragon in the Sea.) Herbert has written other things besides Dune.

_Under Pressure_ is an interesting look at submariners in a future conflict. The western powers are in a conflict with the east, and the eastern powers have most of the oil. The subtug Fenian Ram is one of the boats that sneaks into eastern bloc waters to steal oil from underwater repositories. It's like the old joke "I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?", as the sub's captain has developed symptoms of paranoia, but these can be viewed as a survival oriented adaptation go the circumstances under which he lives. He really can't trust anyone else, including members of his own crew.

Another couple of books with interesting ideas marred by clumsy prose are _Whipping Star_ and _The Dosadi Experiment_. The protagonist lives in a world where an underlying assumption is that government should work, but not too well. He's a high-level operative for the Department of Sabotage, whose mission is to toss monkey wrenches into other departments which are becoming too efficient.

Dune is certainly Herbert's magnum opus, but it's far from all he wrote.
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Dennis