Let's Talk About Science Fiction

[Valka D'Ur]

@illram, Don'te listen to Valka , the prequels/sequels written by the son and the other guy aren't that bad

You will probably not enjoy them if you go in expecting Frank Herbert though, his writing style can not be matched.. if you go in expecting a light space opera type story, then you might have a good time, circumstances depending.

The stories definitely have everything to do with the original 6 novels. But either way I wouldn't call any of Dune hard science fiction.

But ya, the KJA/Herbert Jr. novels are not horrible. People who hang out on Dune forums seem to hate them though, you'll run into a lot of people on there who are just obsessed with the subject (not you Valka, you're cool!). It's sort of like the whole hate of ENterprise & the JJ reboot you'll see discussed on Trek forums. Die hard Trek fans who care too much about canon pile up tons of hate on them. They are out of control. The novels can be enjoyed if you go in expecting the right thing.

O-kay... Warpus, I spent several years on Dune forums - admin'd a couple of them for awhile, and things went okay until the nuDune books came out and fandom promptly split into several different factions.

The nuDune books (anything with Kevin J. Anderson/Brian Herbert's) names on them ARE horrible. They're badly written, badly plotted, the characters are basically caricatures, KJA/BH completely missed the whole point of the Butlerian Jihad, they retconned the entirety of the original Dune novel that FRANK HERBERT wrote into some "propaganda tract" Paul ordered Irulan to write, and that goddamn Norma Cenva is the worst deus-ex-machina plot device I have ever seen!

Paul was NOT born on Kaitain, and he and Bronso of Ix did NOT run away on a Guild Heighliner and join the circus when Paul was 12 (it states clearly in Dune that the crossing to Arrakis was the first time Paul had ever been off Caladan, and it was also made plain that he was born there). Duncan Idaho's first battle in the Atreides' service was on Grumman, not as part of that nonsense KJA/BH wrote.

The Butlerian Jihad was NOT about fighting "thinking machines." It was an Imperium-wide civil war of pro-computer/thinking machine humans vs. anti-computer/thinking machine humans. It was a war of ideology that became a religious war, and we all know how long those can drag on, right?

The mess they made of "Dune 7" - the Hunters/Sandworms books - shows they weren't paying attention to the previous two books. The question of who Marty and Daniel were is obvious: They were the next step in Face Dancer evolution. They were NOT Erasmus and Omnius, who were merely a couple of robots invented by KJA/BH to control the other machines that ran around like the Dune version of Terminators.

And I take a rather dim view of a professional author (Kevin J. Anderson) referring to people who don't like his books as "Talifans."

 

[Serutan]

Don't hold back Valka - tell us how you really feel.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Don't hold back Valka - tell us how you really feel.

Don't think I couldn't write a whole book about this.

 

[Leifmk]

I've only read Timeships and I liked that quite a bit, I'm not sure about any other of his novels, but I have heard good things.

Some of them are good, some are too unrelentingly crapsack.

 

[Plotinus]

I've only read Timeships and I liked that quite a bit, I'm not sure about any other of his novels, but I have heard good things.

I've read the Northland series. In some ways very good, in other ways rather disappointing. I felt that the second two didn't really live up to the promise of the first, in that they mainly just developed the ideas in the first book and didn't introduce much that was genuinely new - especially the third. Also, probably not to be recommended if you don't like bodily functions.

 

[El_Machinae]

Here's where I am: Sci-fi can either be fantasy, or sci-fi. Hardness then becomes a gradient with fantasy.

In Star Trek, they want the crew walking around the ship. How? Artificial gravity. How do they talk with Starfleet Command? Subspace frequencies. Technobabble to get the plot device done.

Then there's harder sci-fi. My favorite (and some people saw this coming) is John C. Wright's the Golden Age trilogy. There's lot of stuff that 'happens' because of plot. We know it's technically feasible, but we don't know how. So, he let's stuff happen that we know is technically feasible (incredible VR interfaces, for example), and doesn't let other stuff happen (ignoring g's while traveling, ignoring c, etc.)

And then the hardest sci-fi is one where they take known theoretical physics and work within it. This occasionally reasonably get us around c, but it doesn't need to. The aliens evolved in their way for some reason. Communications are delayed by distance, etc.

I have a hard time putting a finger on the type of Sci-fi I want to read. I like books that deal with "big" ideas, rather than action, space opera type stuff.

I really, really recommend Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams then. Reasonably hard sci-fi. BIG ideas; I've rarely seen bigger. Baxter's giant problem is that he relies on exposition, but this book is a series of short stories, and exposition works way, way better in a short-story setting. I really recommend it. Like I said, pretty hard sci-fi, all told. Some theoretical physics, but not to the point of fantasy

 

[sanabas]

Here's where I am: Sci-fi can either be fantasy, or sci-fi. Hardness then becomes a gradient with fantasy.

In Star Trek, they want the crew walking around the ship. How? Artificial gravity. How do they talk with Starfleet Command? Subspace frequencies. Technobabble to get the plot device done.

Then there's harder sci-fi. My favorite (and some people saw this coming) is John C. Wright's the Golden Age trilogy. There's lot of stuff that 'happens' because of plot. We know it's technically feasible, but we don't know how. So, he let's stuff happen that we know is technically feasible (incredible VR interfaces, for example), and doesn't let other stuff happen (ignoring g's while traveling, ignoring c, etc.)

And then the hardest sci-fi is one where they take known theoretical physics and work within it. This occasionally reasonably get us around c, but it doesn't need to. The aliens evolved in their way for some reason. Communications are delayed by distance, etc.

I think you missed a category in there.

I can't stand Star Trek, it's not just technobabble to set up the world, it's technobabble to solve whatever problems the crew happened to have got into. It's basically fantasy set in space, instead of Harry Potter waving his wand, you have Kirk waving his tricorder. Plus the large-scale hand-waving, like warp speed, they don't bother to keep it coherent.

Good space opera-type stuff, like Bujold's Vorkosigan series, there's handwaving in the setup of the universe (in this case, artificial gravity, wormholes that have enabled ancient humanity to spread out and enable travel between systems), but the stuff is internally consistent, and relevant to the plot. No FTL travel, communication can be beamed at lightspeed and then physically jumped through wormhole by a ship, so communication delays matter, wormhole jumps are essentially chokepoints for travelling, so are relevant to tactics, etc, etc.

The category/s that I think you missed are the 'what-if' type of stories, and/or speculative fiction. They're fantasy using your definition above, because they postulate something that we don't know is feasible, or that as far as we know is not feasible at all, but I don't think they should be classed as fantasy, because they don't just handwave any problems away like Star Trek does. Instead they take a couple of fantastical elements, but then build logically from there. Like Frankenstein, The Time Machine, The Chrysalids, 1984, Charles Stross' stuff like Glasshouse or Halting State, Only Forward, Anathem, Spider Robinson's Lifehouse trilogy, alternate history like the 1632 series, and the most recent books like that I've read, which is co-authored by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth & The Long War, with The Long Mars being published next month.

 

[El_Machinae]

Good point. I don't know what I would classify 1984 as. Now, the Time Machine is a weird one, because a wizard could have ported through time to see the effect of natural evolution. That said, I've not read it. The magic is just a story-telling device to describe potential future history, like 1984 was. Huh. Dunno

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I think you missed a category in there.
...
The category/s that I think you missed are the 'what-if' type of stories, and/or speculative fiction. They're fantasy using your definition above, because they postulate something that we don't know is feasible, or that as far as we know is not feasible at all, but I don't think they should be classed as fantasy, because they don't just handwave any problems away like Star Trek does. Instead they take a couple of fantastical elements, but then build logically from there. Like Frankenstein, The Time Machine, The Chrysalids, 1984, Charles Stross' stuff like Glasshouse or Halting State, Only Forward, Anathem, Spider Robinson's Lifehouse trilogy, alternate history like the 1632 series, and the most recent books like that I've read, which is co-authored by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth & The Long War, with The Long Mars being published next month.

Good point. I don't know what I would classify 1984 as. Now, the Time Machine is a weird one, because a wizard could have ported through time to see the effect of natural evolution. That said, I've not read it. The magic is just a story-telling device to describe potential future history, like 1984 was. Huh. Dunno

Actually, you've both missed a bit. There are numerous sub-genres. The Chrysalids falls into the "post-apocalypse" category, since it deals with radiation-caused mutations and the social fallout of a culture barely having survived nuclear war.

BTW, I read The Chrysalids in Grade 10, in the fall of 1977, during a time when nuclear war was something people worried about on a fairly regular basis. The book gave me one of the worst nightmares I've ever had in my life, and I remember it vividly to this day, including when it occurred: November 29, 1977, around 4 a.m. I was so freaked out, my cat was also upset as well.

1984 is dystopian SF, as are other novels such as The Handmaid's Tale and Brave New World.

The Time Machine is obviously in the category of time travel.

Depending on how the story is handled, alternate history could be separate, but is often intertwined with time travel. An example of this would be Leo Frankowski's Cross-Time Engineer series, in which a 20th-century Polish engineer accidentally time travels to 13th-century Poland with nothing more than the clothes on his back and the contents of his backpack. He has no way to return, so he sets out to first survive, then modernize his then-present existence in medieval Poland as best he can, and damn the consequences to "real" history.

 

[timtofly]

Don't forget Planet of the Apes. It was a time warp version of apocalyptic cause.

 

[sanabas]

Actually, you've both missed a bit. There are numerous sub-genres. The Chrysalids falls into the "post-apocalypse" category, since it deals with radiation-caused mutations and the social fallout of a culture barely having survived nuclear war.

Yeah, you can certainly break things into narrower & narrower sub-categories. Just think a lot of them don't fall into that neat hardness/fantasy gradient based on how feasible/possible it is.

I don't remember when I first read The Chrysalids, but I've been a fan of John Wyndham's stuff since at least early high school, and I'm pretty sure I was watching Chocky before I'd ever read one of his books.

Depending on how the story is handled, alternate history could be separate, but is often intertwined with time travel. An example of this would be Leo Frankowski's Cross-Time Engineer series, in which a 20th-century Polish engineer accidentally time travels to 13th-century Poland with nothing more than the clothes on his back and the contents of his backpack. He has no way to return, so he sets out to first survive, then modernize his then-present existence in medieval Poland as best he can, and damn the consequences to "real" history.

I haven't heard of that one, will have to look for it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Don't forget Planet of the Apes. It was a time warp version of apocalyptic cause.

You're thinking of the movie, obviously. Planet of the Apes was based on the novel Monkey Planet, by Pierre Bouille, and the story didn't take place on Earth. The planet was in orbit around Rigel, and was a case of parallel evolution with a reverse twist.

 

[Tarquelne]

Has anyone ever read any of the Greatship books by Robert Reed?

Yes. "Marrow" is one of my favorite books. Curiously, though, "An Exaltation of Larks" is my favorite Reed book. Not what I'd call hard sci-fi, but some good big ideas.

Dune:

That nuDune series is an abomination! Its authors deserve a punishment greater than anything in history.

Wait, no ... I'm remembering what Revered Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam said of Alia, thinking her abomination.

I merely loathe the new Dune books. If they hadn't "stolen" the Dune setting, I'd simply dislike them.

IIRC, the only case of an author picking up another author's work I actually liked was Donald Kingsbury's "Psychohistorical Crisis". IMO he greatly improved on Asimov's Foundation setting. It's set long after Asimov's books, and it's not even plainly the same universe at all. Clearly a homage, it's more of a re-invention than an extension. (As a point of the book's history we discover there was no "Mule" for example. But there was somebody called "Cloun-the-Stubborn" who had the same effect, but through "hard" sci-fi means.) Some interesting new big ideas. The mathematics of secrecy being a good one.



A good author for "big ideas" is Greg Egan. I'd especially recommend him to anyone who liked Wright's "The Golden Age" or the immortality-bit in the Greatships series. I'm not a fan of everything he's written, but "Permutation City," "Diaspora," and the anthology "Axiomatic" are stuffed-full of crunchy, big-idea goodness.

Hard vs. soft sci-fi, I'd classify him as "hard."

I think Valka D'ur had it right, speaking of "emphasis". Personally, I'll forgive quite a bit of indistinguishable-from-magic if it's handled well, and the fiction offers something else beyond it.

What I *don't* like is sci-fi that's only superficially sci-fi. You've got space ships, you've got blasters, but you don't have a story that wouldn't work just as well as fantasy, or noir, or high-sea adventure. Such fiction might still be a good read, though I'd say the odds are against it. And if you've got an itch to read some good sci-fi, it's not going to scratch it.

Quite a bit of *great* sci-fi is what I generally call "social science-fiction." There may be handwaving, but the technology isn't at all the point. The point is what people do about it. I'll put up John Barnes' "Thousand Cultures" as a good example of that genre.

Speaking of genre's and hard vs. soft sci-fi, I'd consider Scott Westerfield's "Risen Empire" trilogy to be "hard space-opera."

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yes. "Marrow" is one of my favorite books. Curiously, though, "An Exaltation of Larks" is my favorite Reed book. Not what I'd call hard sci-fi, but some good big ideas.

Dune:

That nuDune series is an abomination! Its authors deserve a punishment greater than anything in history.

Wait, no ... I'm remembering what Revered Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam said of Alia, thinking her abomination.

I merely loathe the new Dune books. If they hadn't "stolen" the Dune setting, I'd simply dislike them.

IIRC, the only case of an author picking up another author's work I actually liked was Donald Kingsbury's "Psychohistorical Crisis". IMO he greatly improved on Asimov's Foundation setting. It's set long after Asimov's books, and it's not even plainly the same universe at all. Clearly a homage, it's more of a re-invention than an extension. (As a point of the book's history we discover there was no "Mule" for example. But there was somebody called "Cloun-the-Stubborn" who had the same effect, but through "hard" sci-fi means.) Some interesting new big ideas. The mathematics of secrecy being a good one.



A good author for "big ideas" is Greg Egan. I'd especially recommend him to anyone who liked Wright's "The Golden Age" or the immortality-bit in the Greatships series. I'm not a fan of everything he's written, but "Permutation City," "Diaspora," and the anthology "Axiomatic" are stuffed-full of crunchy, big-idea goodness.

Hard vs. soft sci-fi, I'd classify him as "hard."

I think Valka D'ur had it right, speaking of "emphasis". Personally, I'll forgive quite a bit of indistinguishable-from-magic if it's handled well, and the fiction offers something else beyond it.

What I *don't* like is sci-fi that's only superficially sci-fi. You've got space ships, you've got blasters, but you don't have a story that wouldn't work just as well as fantasy, or noir, or high-sea adventure. Such fiction might still be a good read, though I'd say the odds are against it. And if you've got an itch to read some good sci-fi, it's not going to scratch it.

Quite a bit of *great* sci-fi is what I generally call "social science-fiction." There may be handwaving, but the technology isn't at all the point. The point is what people do about it. I'll put up John Barnes' "Thousand Cultures" as a good example of that genre.

Speaking of genre's and hard vs. soft sci-fi, I'd consider Scott Westerfield's "Risen Empire" trilogy to be "hard space-opera."

No, you were right the first time. The nuDune books are an abomination. In fact, I recall posting on the official DuneNovels forum that they are a "tragic waste of trees."

For some reason, Byron Merritt, the admin there, didn't appreciate my saying that. I wonder if the fact that he's Frank Herbert's grandson and one of the people who has benefited from the Herbert estate (presumably including in some respect the nuDune books) had anything to do with that? 'Cause the way he kept defending the nuDune fans' nutty ideas, it's obvious he doesn't understand the Original Six novels, either.


On the issue of one author picking up the mantle of another author's series, I'd have to say that Deborah J. Ross has done a decent job with the last half-dozen or so Darkover books, especially the latest two. Hastur Lord very soon became one of my favorite novels in the series, and the most recent one, The Children of Kings, features a different way of depicting the Dry-Town culture (not a Free Amazon in sight!).

 

[Glassfan]

I have to admit when I saw that Brian Herbert was continuing his father's Dune stories I was very excited. I guess I was thinking along the lines of a Christopher Tolkien. But reading that first book was so incredibly disappointing that I've virtually sworn off prequel/sequels altogether.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Actually, House Atreides isn't the worst offender of the "Houses" trilogy, although it's bad enough. I could understand them opting to fill in some of Duke Leto's backstory, since most of that was never really touched on in the real Dune books. But it got really ridiculous, really fast, with the whole subplot of Leto's mother being lifted from the Peter the Great miniseries (his mother turned out to be a traitor), and the backstories of Duncan and Gurney blatantly contradicting what was set out in Dune.

But maybe part of the reason I don't hate it as much as their other books is because I was in the hospital for several weeks, and that's the book my mother bought me to read.


KJA/BH got plenty of negative feedback on the first trilogy, though, so I don't know why the rest turned out so crappy. The Butlerian Jihad novels were the absolute worst offenders, in my opinion.

 

[Ajidica]

The Butlerian Jihad novels were the absolute worst offenders, in my opinion.

Honestly, the Butlerian Jihad novels bothered me the least in that they mucked up Dune canon the least. The House books just felt odd given how close time-wise they are to Dune yet having a completely different emphasis and tone (although I would be lying if I said I didn't find them entertaining, but then again I did read them when I was 15).
I enjoyed the Jihad books more, paradoxically because it was so clear that they only kept the Dune label to sell the books. (Also, they were the first Dune books I read and what got me to read Dune in the first place, so they aren't all bad.)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Honestly, the Butlerian Jihad novels bothered me the least in that they mucked up Dune canon the least. The House books just felt odd given how close time-wise they are to Dune yet having a completely different emphasis and tone (although I would be lying if I said I didn't find them entertaining, but then again I did read them when I was 15).
I enjoyed the Jihad books more, paradoxically because it was so clear that they only kept the Dune label to sell the books. (Also, they were the first Dune books I read and what got me to read Dune in the first place, so they aren't all bad.)

The Butlerian Jihad was not man-vs-robots. It was a holy war of ideology between humans. There were humans who considered thinking machines to be good, useful tools, and had no problem trusting them with decisions such as whether or not to abort a woman's fetus without her consent. This is what touched off the Jihad - Jehane Butler's non-consensual abortion. Thinking machines were also linked in to so many other facets of society in that time, that many humans got lazy in how they thought for themselves, or if they even bothered to think for themselves at all.

So Jehane Butler and her husband lent their names to the war to eradicate thinking machines. The Bene Gesserit already existed at this time, BTW; the nuDune notion that all the Great Schools started after is sheer nonsense.

My source for this is the Dune Encyclopedia. No, it wasn't written by Frank Herbert. However, it was written by Frank Herbert's friend, Dr. Willis McNelly, and FH officially approved of it (with the caveat that anything he wrote that took place after God Emperor of Dune that contradicted the Encyclopedia would supersede it as official canon).

There were no Terminator-style robots or mechas in the Butlerian Jihad. Society was not controlled by "Titans." Humans were not slave-animals. The Jihad was fought between humans who subscribed to one ideology or the other - "thinking machines/computers are good" vs "thinking machines/computers are evil."

Remember one of the dictums in the Orange Catholic Bible? "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." That is one of the prime ideologies that came out of the Butlerian Jihad. Therefore, computers were utterly destroyed, and humans had to develop alternate technologies and their own minds. The Jihad started over 200 years before the existence of the Spacing Guild, and before the Mentats officially existed - although of course there were already humans who were working to develop their minds and learning how to learn (ie. the Bene Gesserit, and others).

If KJA/BH had novelized the events related in the Encyclopedia, they could have had a great story. But they chose the lazy way out, with thinly-plagiarized "Terminators" and cardboard villains who have no other reason for doing evil things than "Hey, I do evil things because I'm evil" attitudes.

There's another major reason why I loathe the Butlerian Jihad novels: KJA/BH ignore basic physics. They have STL spaceships. Yet EVERYTHING happens in real, simultaneous time. That's impossible. You cannot carry out an interstellar war on those terms and expect that if you spend 2 weeks traveling from one solar system to another, it's going to be just 2 weeks later on the planet where you're going.

The final aggravation: Norma Cenva. She was fine at first... until she was turned into the most annoying deus-ex-machina character ever. She even turns up at the end of Sandworms of Dune to rescue everyone in the last couple of pages - after 15,000 years of wandering around, "pondering."

KJA/BH turned a literary masterpiece of a series into nothing more than a combination of a Terminator/Star Wars/Saturday-morning cartoon ripoff, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Except they aren't. 'Cause it's all about the money, you know.

 

[Tarquelne]

... the Dune Encyclopedia ...

I need to find my copy. That may be my third-favorite "Dune" book.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Have you read National Lampoon's Doon? That's the only non-Herbert/McNelly Dune book I'd recommend, other than Ed Naha's book chronicling the making of the Lynch movie.