Short Takes

12/9/05 Finished Rick Santorum's book, It takes a Family - excellent exposition of conservative thought, Zoomed through Let's Roll, by Lisa Beamer - inspiring tearjerker.

12/14/05 Finished Hopscotch, by Kevin Anderson - piece of drivel. The book by John Kessel (Good News from Outer Space) I couldn't even finish - worse drivel .

GameEarth by Kevin Anderson

As a former Dungeons & Dragons player, I enjoy a good D&D ripoff novel as well as the next barbarian...the key word here being "good." I'm afraid that Anderson's GameEarth doesn't really fall into that category. The novel contains two plots - the story of the four kids playing a game of which some have grown tired, and the story of the PCs and NPCs in the world generated by that game.

Anderson does generate an interesting effect, by having the characters in GameEarth acknowledge that their world has grown old, that all the evil monsters have been killed, all the great heroes left to regale their glory days amidst a sea of tavern ale, and that there's nothing much worth living for. I'm afraid, though, that this sort of attitude won't carry a tale past the first fifty pages, and it didn't. The most unbelievable thing about this novel is that he actually wrote a sequel... two of them...and they got published...and reprinted???

Dune, the House Trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

You know, this group of books is way too much material to handle in a single review, but it would be even worse if I had to come up with separate reviews for Dune: House Harkonnen, Dune: House Atreides and Dune: House Corrino, so we'll just deal with it all as we may. Andy Rooney used to have a spiel for Sixty Minutes that began, "Didja ever wonder?" With that in mind:


Didja ever wonder how Jessica, the Bene Gesseret, ended up married to Duke Leto? Why Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck hated the Harkonnens so badly? Why everyone hated the Tleilaxu so much? What the heck, Kynes, the Imperial planetologist, was doing on Arrakis in the first place? How the Landsraad Council governed? What's the scoop with Beast Rabban and Feyd, and why was Baron Harkonnen such a fat pig?

Well, the answer to these and many other questions can be found by reading this trilogy, a set of prequels to Dune.

Quite some time ago, I read a book called The Garbage Chronicles, by Brian Herbert, and it WAS - garbage. So I was understandably reluctant to pick these up, but since I found copies of all three at the local library, I couldn't go too far wrong. Well, either time has honed Brian's skills, or the partnership with Anderson made him a more cogent and coherent storyteller, but this trilogy was quite engrossing.

Unfortunately, the amount of separate story lines that one has to follow through the books can make reading them frustrating at times, especially if, like me, you dislike jumping around from plot to plot and place to place. But, as the tension slowly builds throughout the series, each separate element adds the missing pieces to the puzzle, until you fully comprehend the situation extant in Dune.

Often brutal, highly imaginative, and good for both gasps and guffaws, I recommend these books highly.


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