There’s apparently a new remake coming out.
Unpopular opinion (which I’ve probably expressed here before): Dune is the most overrated book in SF. And the sequels were terrible.
On a sad note, I recently decided to finally pick up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which has been on the bookshelf for decades (paperback), and read it. I couldn’t get more than a few pages in. Heinlein really needed an editor in his later years.
Any thoughts on the most underrated book in SF?
Not really. Never gave it much thought.
Not most underrated, probably, but a book that is cinematic as hell as well as a great read but which gets mentioned far less than many of the author’s other works and has, for no discernable reason, never been given the feature film treatment, is Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight.
And yet the truly ghastly Dune is now getting its third go-around in 35 years.
Go figure.
Dune was a hard, hard slog for me. I had no desire to read any of the sequel books.
He (Butler) considers the 1984 David Lynch movie version a failure, by way of how he titled the link to it. But I’ve seen worse since.
We’ll see.
The first time I ever walked out of a movie theater was when I saw (part of) Dune in 1984. It’s the second movie I walked out on, the first being Mccabe and Mrs. Miller – but it was being shown in the auditorium at Florida Institute of Technology, which I didn’t (and don’t) consider a movie theater.
So you finished the thing. Perhaps that makes you a better man than I. Or perhaps just one with a significantly higher pain tolerance. I tried reading the godawful thing twice and failed each time at about the 60 page mark. Trying to read it was like trying to stare into an Arrakian sandstorm sans goggles.
I tried to re-read Dune recently, and found myself skipping through looking for the good parts, after a bit I realized that there just really weren’t any. I think it just stood out at the time, it was good storytelling with good world building, at a time when that wasn’t what was getting published.
Dune Messiah was just awful. Children of Dune was Ok but nothing special. God Emperor of Dune had a few good spots but could have been 1/4 the length and not lost anything.
I though that Chapterhouse Dune and Heretics of Dune were by far the best of the series. I haven’t checked out the later novels written by his son.
Like all “serial” novels, in order to fully enjoy Chapterhouse Dune and Heretics of Dune, do you have to be familiar with all the shoe leather prose in the other 3 prequels? Maybe if so, I’ll wait until I’ve read up on my Dune series Cliff Notes.
Wow. Rare praise for Chapterhouse: Dune!
I think Dune Messiah was a fascinating idea that didn’t succed in execution: it was meant to be a deconstruction of the myth built up in the first book: prophet hero turned to murderous tyrant.
I think it just stood out at the time, it was good storytelling with good world building, at a time when that wasn’t what was getting published.
A lot of truth to that. The emphasis on ecology just a few years before the environmental movement took off did not hurt, either.
Herbert was also an above average stylist, in a field where prose usually limped – even the holy trinity of Clark, Heinlein and Asimov were not exactly gifted prose writers.
Herbert was also an above average stylist, in a field where prose usually limped
For some definition of above and average….
That’s why I limited it to sci-fi! (Especially, in those days.)
I think the very best sci-fi book of that era, and maybe still today, was CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter Miller, and not just because the prose (by any standard) really sang. Of course, unlike DUNE, there is basically *zero* chance of that ever seeing a screen adaptation.
If you’ve read enough SF/F, you know this is not an especially high bar.
Above average stylist? Herbert? Not on this planet. Unless impenetrability is your chosen metric.
Asimov was certainly the weakest of the so-called Holy Trinity – his dialogue was fairly awful and his best characters were robots – but even he was parsecs ahead of Herbert.
Heinlein was quite a good writer, especially of dialogue. How much he was a “stylist” is hard to say. He never struck me as a writer who self-consciously “styled” anything.
Clarke, I always found to be a really excellent user of the language as was Poul Anderson.
Actually, I think where Asimov and Clarke suffered the most was in characterization. As in, their characters – especially the women – never really had any. (Though Salvor Hardin had a kind of rascally likability.)
They had *great* imagination and ability to ponder big questions. But too often their work was (I thought) terribly clunky and awkward.
I concede the point about Heinlein, who always seemed to have a wonderful rough authenticity in his dialogue (save maybe the really preachy didactic stuff in Starship Troopers).
As for Herbert – well, this may just be a case of de gustibus non est disputandum.
I liked the SyFy miniseries, even with its limited budget (which shows) better than the De Laurentis movie. Dune is a huge tome with a complex plot and it doesn’t lend itself to movie length treatments. Any attempt to edit it to a movie length screenplay is going to have problems, no matter how skilled the actors and crew are. It’s going to be inaccurate, mostly boring, or both.
There isn’t any “expanded universe” it could lean on to build all the convoluted backstories about all the various groups involved in the plot (the Spacing Guild, Bene Geserit, Tlilaxu, Harkonens, Sardukar, Lansrad, etc, etc), so it’s kind of like trying to do Avengers Endgame as a stand-alone movie. Worse, the plot depends on lots of key characters whose actions are inseparable from all those boring and overly-complicated groups, so there’s no good way to avoid the need for world building on the level of Tolkien or Star Trek.
And when you get down to it, the payoff just isn’t worth it. I would just go straight to the final scene and have Al Pacino (as Maud D’ib) kill the Harkonen with a chain saw and exult “All you stinking drug addicts tried to take me out, but I booby trapped the entire supply of blow and now I’m gonna be callin’ all the shots!”
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. You could maybe flesh it out with an elaborate back story about how he founded Greenpeace, birthed Al Qaeda, and took over the Blockbuster Video chain from the Hunt brothers, but it’s still going to culminate in him squeezing everybody by the short hairs and gloating over controlling all the spice.
The book also takes itself too seriously. I can’t even think of a single scene that would be amusing, much less light-hearted. And virtually the entire audience has already read the book, so no matter how worthy the effort, everyone who sees it is going to say “the book was better.”
By far the best Dune movie is Jodorowsky’s Dune (subtitled), which is a movie about the first attempt to make a Dune movie, an effort which led directly to a lot of the iconic images that showed up in all the other movies that weren’t Dune, such as Alien and Blade Runner.
The plot of Dune may be complicated, but the story is simple. Duke Leto loses his life to his archrival over the source of the “spice drug”, which is just a Hitchcockian “Macguffin” to propel the story, but it turns out there is a twist as to why the Duke got done in. Son and Momma escape to the desert, son becomes leader of the Fremen with some help from Momma unethically using her Bene Gesserit which is meant for self-defense and folks aren’t supposed to know about, son challenges the son of Dad’s archrival to single combat and prevails, son gets Emperor to bend-the-knee because he threatens to wreck the supply of toilet paper, er, spice, that human civilization relies upon.
Easy peasy!
The toilets must flow!
I thought it was political novel, which said no political system could work, even if spent thousands of year effort and used magic.
I first read “The Prophet of Dune” when it was serialized in Analog. I think I was 14 at the time and liked it a lot, probably because it was the first SF novel of its type. The fact that it had to be published by Chiltons (the car repair publisher) is a major indictment of the SF “gatekeepers” regardless of what you may think of the book itself, 56 years later. I agree about the sequelae. The extended backstory of the Dune series is identical to Asimov’s Robots & Empire backstory, and that’s unlikely to be a coincidence. I think “The Caves of Steel,” despite its manifest flaws (mainly characterization) is one of the greatest SF futility stories ever written, but the extended sequelae are not so hot.
My theory about “The Cat Who Walks Through” walls is, it must have been an abandoned manuscript from Heinlein’s peak writing era in the early 1960s (when he wrote “Podkayne of Mars,” “Glory Road,” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”) that he picked up in his declining years. It starts out promising, then explosively changes direction part way through, when the walls burst open and characters from his other novels come flooding in. I was baffled.
Sometimes when you get to be wildly successful, you can’t find editors willing to say no, or the ones that would have, are dead.
That;s unquestionably true. You can see the problem in George R.R. Martin’s later books.
The problem with Heinlein is that by the late 60’s, the editor would have had to “no” to most of what he was submitting. You really wish Heinlein would have stayed retired after 1973.
As a side note, working backwards I loved reading all the Asimov Foundation books, the Empire prequel works and the Caves of Steel and I, Robot. With the exception of I, Robot all read in that reverse order. That universe kept me captivated. Sort of pre Star Wars for me I guess. I had more of a problem with the magic bullsh*t time machine stories that came as sort of a side story all this when the “Brain” like positronic (three laws) supercomputer machines decided to disappear and massage the universe’s timeline behind humanities’ back. That BS I called like I saw it.
Anybody read the newly-released alternate version of The Number of the Beast, The Pursuit of the Pankera?
Yes. Meh. The first third is identical. The remainder has less arguing over who is in command, way way more Edgar Rice Burroughs, more EE Smith, and a different ending that felt equally rushed, contrived, and “look at me!”
Heinlein’s health issues played hell with his writing. To me, “Friday” is his only post-1973 novel worth re-reading.
You’re being generous – everything post-The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has major problems; IMHO, everything post-TIA (which happened in the late ‘70s) is unreadable; and some of the pre-Moon stuff is very uneven, including Stranger In a Strange Land and Glory Road. Odd considering that his last three juveniles – Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Space-Suit, Will Travel, and Starship Troopers – are some of his best work (Space-Suit is my favorite RAH novel of all time, closely followed by Moon).
Stranger is pretty good for its time, breaking new ground and making statements on religion, plus and minus; it is the extended version that is a miserable slog. Most of us know the backstory of I Will Fear No Evil – medical crisis and bills to pay. But of the later ones, I quite enjoy Job (which may actually be Heinlein’s book on economics that he always said he wanted to write) and Friday. The rest of the later novels are all good, in places, and I am willing to endure the sloggy bits to read the gems.
Yes, agree, nearly all authors write longer and longer as they go on, often to less effect, sometimes to the detriment of their work: David Weber comes to mind. Tom Clancy, too, though he never wrote a short book in his life.
“Time Enough for Love” is a complicated mess, but it includes “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter” which gives it a lifetime free pass for me. I still mist up every time I read it.
I disliked “Glory Road” when I first read it in my teens, but really enjoyed it ten years later, and have re-read it half a dozen times (including recently on audiobook).
Supposedly the commandment out of the Butlerian Jihad was “thou shalt not disfigure the soul.” Yet almost every character in the entire original novel had a “disfigured soul”, either by their own actions or by the actions of the society in general. A society that kept slaves, had “Suk Doctors” with “imperial conditioning”, had “mentats”, had “Saudaukar warriors”, and so forth. Later books had the ‘gholas” and axolotl tanks, and “stoneburners” and such. Even the so-called “Fremen” good guys considered everyone who wasn’t of their tribe to be subhuman and little more that mobile water tanks. The ugliness of that book, the whole series, comes through in the 1984 film version (especially the original uncut version). The question is, was that intentional on the part of the director? I think not.
(I remember one reviewer who described the third book’s ending as “the climax takes the form of a midget covered in Krazy Glue.”)
Just like it is famously said that “West Side Story” is very obviously and transparently “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Great Gatsby” is the same tale as “The Scarlet Letter”, and certainly, “Dune” and “The Godfather” are the same novel.
Gatsby the same as Scarlet Letter, you gasp? OK, Gatsby takes place in a 1920’s of greatly relaxed sexual mores whereas the Puritan in Scarlet Letter are “uptight.” But the story is the same, of a somewhat on-the-spectrum guy setting his sights on a gal “outside his league” and being obsessed when the cool dude gains her affection. OK, Gatsby is somewhat more complicated by the two linked love triangles, of George-Myrtle Wilson-Tom Buchanan and Gatsby-Daisy Buchanan-Tom.
But the principle is the same — aging scholar-dude Roger “Chillingworth” Prynne thinking he can hang on to Hester sending her ahead to the New World where she is Hot for Preacher, Jimmy Gatz thinking he had a chance with society girl Daisy Fay, and not to forget auto mechanic and small business owner George Wilson thinking he can keep pretty Myrtle away from some rich dude who glances at her.
You see, Scarlet Letter should not be read as “those darned Puritans were such vicious prudes” but rather as “geek guy, unlucky at love.” This effect is not just among some guys we know but Silicon Valley billionaires who get “taken for a ride.”
Dune is not about love, unrequited love and love triangles. Rather, it is a boy-becomes-a-man saga, just like the Godfather. In Dune we have Leto and his son Paul, in Godfather, we have the Don and his son Michael.
Think about it, Dune is about “noble criminals” and the Godfather is about gangsters of whom the author tries to elevate as being noble. The “other gangs”, the Harkonnens or the The Five Families are depicted as being depraved and the Corleone’s and Atriede’s are depicted as having higher moral standards.
The Corleone Family as good guys” Well the author thought so. Remember the horses-head-in-the-bed scene that has become a cliché in pop culture. The movie mogul they did this do was identified by Corleone family “fixer” Tom Hagen as molesting child actresses. He doesn’t say this to the Don in so many words, but at least Hagen rationalizes calling down the Corleone “muscle” on the movie mogul’s head, to excuse a pun, as the movie guy being worse than a gangster — at least the Don disapproved of prostitution and especially narcotics and only engaged in book-making because in his view gambling was a harmless pastime that it being made illegal by the authorities was a mystery, and if the Don had someone killed, it was in the course of “business”, as he instructed the mortician who wanted revenge for his daughter being battered by here would-be date rapists that what he did was not murder.
You don’t get to find out much about Duke Leto’s activities, but you can use your imagination that he was no choir boy in a culture where disputes were settled with poisonings and knife killings. Son Paul, starts out as a spoiled brat, but after his father’s demise, rises to become absolute ruler of the known Galaxy by harnessing the fanaticism of the Fremen coupled with the martial arts training he received from the Duke’s capos, and the illicit sharing of techniques known by his off-the-reservation Bene Gesserit momma. This has a parallel in Michael becoming a tougher gangster than the Don ever was.
What I am saying is that if they made a if-not-good-but-popular movie out of The Godfather, they could certainly do the same with Dune if they concentrated on the Michael Corleone/Paul Atreides coming-of-age aspect without having to explain every, single, odd, last detail of the Dune Universe.
“Harkonnen is a pimp. He never could have outfought Leto. But I didn’t know until this day that it was Corrino all along.”
“Don’t ask me about my business, Irulan.”
“You’re not a wartime mentat, Thufir.”
My recollections of high school in the early 1970s was that the books were made to read were “The Great Gatsby”, “The Scarlet Letter”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “Moby Dick” and “The Heart of Darkness.”
The books that my classmates read for recreation rather than they had to were “Journey to Ixtlan”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, “Dune” and the Tolkien novels. The common theme was mind-altering drugs — Tolkien novels could be about that topic, especially if read from that perspective. Oh, and The Godfather was also widely read, but there, the focus was a short but lurid scene about Santino having his way with one of his sister’s bridesmaids, whereas not the focus of the novel, it certainly got the attention of teens of that era.
The Great Gatsby is the same as The Scarlet Letter? Weird.
I quite enjoyed “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”.
Read Dune in 1967 when it came out because I had just read Herbert’s “The Dragon in the Sea”. Also a couple of Dune sequels serialized in Analog. Couldn’t be bothered after that
Read Dune. Everyone told me it was awesome. Had to force myself to finish it..pushed and pushed waiting for the payoff. Tried to read the next book and I dropped it about a quarter of the way.
Went back to watching This Island Earth. Faith Domergue didn’t have the stoopit Bene Gesserit hair-do.
I’ll be the contrarian and admit I like Dune a lot, certainly much better than the (IMHO) highly overrated Foundation books (I recently reread them, including Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth, recently after 30+ years, and was sorely unimpressed). I think Dune is mostly a rollicking good fantasy-cum-space-opera, owing more than a little to Doc Smith and the Lensman stories in spirit.
Now the sequels…hideous in all respects. And given the choice between Dune and one of Heinlein’s classics (but there’s plenty of manure in his stables too), or Asimov’s The End of Eternity, or most Tolkien, or most Stephenson, or even, say, Children of the Lens, most of the time I won’t be picking up the Herbert tome. But sometimes I will. And I confess to being very disappointed with the Lynch movie; my friends and I desperately wanted to like it, but we walked out of the theater with glum faces and said “that was terrible.” But I may go see Villeneuve’s take on it.
Dune is a Rorshach test, more a political or a religious commentary than science fiction. The Fremen’s hard reality sticks a crysknife in liberal nonsense.
We’re way overdue for a major adaptation of Jerry Pournelle.
I know, I know: Fat chance of that happening in a movie industry now overrun with woke millennials.
What about a Niven movie. What with CGI you can now have Pierson Puppeteers
Isn’t Amazon doing an adaptation of Ringworld?
According to imdb yes. However the imdb web page has not been updated since October 2019.
so the production may be in ….. stasis
If it actually happens, that, too, would be amazing to see (and overdue).
If I were going to make a Niven movie adaptation, I’d do “World of Ptavvs.” Then, if that succeeded, I’d spin off a TV series about Lucas Garner and Gil Hamilton. And bearing in mind that “The Warriors” is set in the same time frame, so there’s a pretty good direction the show could go toward. Garner and Hamilton are policemen of the UN ARM forces, which has subjugated humanity. Then the Kzin show up.
Dune’s not science fiction, it’s fantasy that happens to be set in space. I liked the worldbuilding, and that the characters could have conflict despite the fact that most of them weren’t morons.
Had no desire to even try to read the sequels, though.
I would definitely agree that’s it belongs in the fantasy genre.
Memory is stored in DNA, and only “magic” people can access it. “The voice” the Bene Geserit use is akin to a magic incantations or spells, the same as bewitching people. For numeric calculations they rely on magical math people, like consulting mages. To navigate between stars they rely on mutants who get really high on drugs. Combat is hand to hand, and the outcome is determined by hard living instead of strategy and tactics, based on which soldiers have the most hit points or the best health meter. Thopters and sand worms are just stand ins for dragons. And the protagonist was a seer or oracle.
I’ve been told by those SF fans I know who have read/slogged through most or all of the Dune books that Dune is the best and you can stop there. I read Dune, and I did stop there. I can’t put my thumb on why, but I can buy into Asimov’s galactic empire far easier then I can Herbert’s.
When David Lynch’s Dune was about to come out I read some magazine article that praised how much money they had spent on the sets and costumes, and that set alarm bells ringing in my head. Who wrote the script and how much money did they pay him?, I wondered. The movie was awful. Didn’t walk out on it, but it was a waste of time and celluloid. The Sci-Fi Channel mini-series was much better.
I’ve looked up the new Dune movie on imdb, and the cast looks pretty uneven. I think I’ll pass on it. Maybe if someone loans me the DVD one day…
Part of the problem is the Dune universe doesn’t have the technological or social sophistication required to be a multi-planet civilization. It’s almost like contemplating the Federation of Planets when all the members are essentially on the developmental level of nomadic African tribesmen, aside from a few members of the elite whose family money managed to get them into Oxford.
Then we have the ancient houses, with entire planets or planetary systems controlled by hereditary monarchies whose members fights each other in single combat to the death. That really doesn’t hang together as a rational future possibility. Whenever Star Trek had an episode that featured trial by combat, it had to concoct some interesting reason why the rulers in an odd and unsustainable situation would pit Kirk against a Gorn or some slave babe. In Dune, it’s just how future human leaders settle disputes because we apparently can’t think of a better idea. Yet somehow we have FTL space ships.
It requires too much suspension of disbelief because, in theory, we shouldn’t have to be suspending so much disbelief for a science fiction story as opposed to stories about elves, goblins, and vampires. Thus the attempt at deep world-building doesn’t quite work out for many people because, despite the complexity, too much of it doesn’t make logical sense.
Part of the problem is the Dune universe doesn’t have the technological or social sophistication required to be a multi-planet civilization.
But isn’t that basically what happens in the FOUNDATION trilogy? I mean, what we see in the first two books especially is that the outer regions of the Galaxy lapse into “barbarism,” which is represented as being feudalistic, or at least, quasi-feudal. Terminus quickly finds itself surrounded by four petty kingdoms dominated by landed aristocracies and bountiful superstition, which they then exploit…
But given what Herbert gives us of the intervening human history (especially the Butlerian Jihad), I think what we see is that the same thing happens in both Asimove’s and Herbert’s stories: an advanced technology-focused and presumably social post-modern space-faring human civilization expands throughout the galaxy, but later experiences a limited collapse and most of it lapses into something resembling feudalism.
Truth is, I am rather skeptical it’s plausible in *either* Asimov’s Herbert’s worlds, since it just seems highly unlikely in such a vast and distant set of colonized worlds that you would ever see more than a few fall back into that kind of social existence. Perhaps what is the hard buy-in for the DUNE books is the expanded, and scientifically unexplained new role for human consciousness, accessed through genetic breeding, spice ingestion, and esoteric training. There is nothing quite like that in FOUNDATION, at least, not until you get to Asimov’s final batch of novels…though maybe the mentalics of the Second Foundation require more explaining than Asimove ever gave us.
Late Heinlein is awful, yes.
I agree about the Dune sequels (the second book is decent, but it goes downhill).
I think Dune is a great book that stands up to re-reading, but it might still be overrated, because it’s so incredibly highly rated.
(Contra others, I love Lynch’s Dune, even if it’s not an amazing adaptation of the book – and to be fair, nothing can be in two and a quarter hours.)
It has grown on me over time. Therefore I too am not as harsh on it as I was at first. I think the SyFy remake special effects of the Guild Navigators in action was superb. Even if what I saw of it didn’t otherwise impress.
Dune’s culture and basic plot points are essentially a fictionalization of Arab and Islamic history. It’s the rise of Islam from medieval times combined with the Arab nationalization of oil resources which was clearly coming from the early sixties. The spice drug is just petroleum by the way. The rise of a prophet unifying all the freemen (Bedouin) is Islamic history. Not much more to it than that. Lots of Arabic words and pseudo-Islamic references. He put two eras together into a single moment.
I read the book when I was a teenager and loved it. Read it again as an adult, with a strong background in the Middle East and thought it was terrible. I had trouble pushing myself through it. It’s harder to read as wildly imaginative world building if you’re familiar with the source material (as Herbert clearly was). Its strongest point had become its weakest. Once you get past the “creation of a whole culture” myth you are still left with a pretty good story though.
Ringworld is an example of an SF novel that really stands the test of time in my opinion. A World Out of Time by Niven is a good example of an underrated work of imagination.
There is something to that.
Concomittantly, too, it stretches credulity to imagine a fully successful ecumenical unification as represented by the CET, and the “Orange Catholic Bible.” The appendix history of religion Herbert throws in at the back actually makes it more, not less, incredible. It’s one thing to merge a few German Protestant churches. It’s a far different deal to fuse together all the world’s major world religions, with no apparent resistors. But this is the sort of thing that isn’t a surprise to see in an idealistic non-religious 60’s liberal such as Herbert, who viewed religion with an outsider’s detached clinical eye.
Dune only tied for best novel for 1966’s Hugos. The other author was the undeservedly-forgotten Roger Zelazny, whose fix-up novel, “This Immortal” tied Dune for best novel.
Yeah, really liked Zelazny.
I’m in the middle of re-reading Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Songs of Distant Earth” after many years and really liking it. Would make a nice movie, too.
I always thought Zelazny’s best book was “Isle of the Dead,” and that Francis Sandow is a perfect SF character. “Nine Princes in Amber” started off well (and far better than “Game of Thrones”), but then fizzled off into pretty much the same kind of mess.
One other thought: I think even before Coronavirus, it was going to be an uphill struggle for DUNE to actually turn a profit. Scott Mendelson at Forbes yesterday identified part of the problem: “The movie must avoid being seen as a pretender to the throne/glorified knock-off of the films its source material inspired.” Casual viewers may glance at the trailers and think it’s just regurgitated Stars Wars.
It’s also a risk in another way: Like Villenueve’s previous film, BLADE RUNNER 2049, it’s an older legacy IP with a devoted but rather niche following, which like BLADE RUNNER *seems* to me to be focused demographically on middle aged or older white men (though perhaps not to quite the same extent). That’s a big challenge for a movie with what is sure to be a $150-200 million production budget, which you basically have to double to cover the marketing costs. Splitting the book into two movies has surely saved some money with all location shoots having been done at once, but then, it also means you’re asking moviegoers to come back for the second installment. And it will be worse if each film ends up, like BLADE RUNNER, over the 150 minute mark (fewer showings per day, and thus, fewer tickets you can sell).
The one thing DUNE has going in its favor is that it has a more marketable ensemble cast than BLADE RUNNER 2049 did. It will need every ounce of that appeal to get the diverse 18-30 year old demographic that you absolutely need in droves to make bank on a tentpole flick. I tend to doubt it will get it, no matter how good a job Villenueve once again manages to do.
” I recently decided to finally pick up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which has been on the bookshelf for decades (paperback), and read it. I couldn’t get more than a few pages in. “
I ended up doing the same thing a few years back. Glad I’m not the only one.
I couldn’t get past the 976th chapter of God Emperor of Dune. It felt that long. It was a [expletiv]ing mobius. In one chapter some unknown characters are traveling somewhere, in the next the latest Duncan Idaho ghola tries to kill Leto, and the cycle repeats.