The Shrander, Dr. Haends and Sandra Shen are all a permutation of the letters.

It is a very creepy book, but I don’t understand why the Shrander wants them to go there.

Funny thing, me and the other teenager at work who liked SF gave this to each other for the office Xmas party that year (I suspect he’d also already bought himself a copy, which I had not, so the WIN was mine). The various backstories that a bunch of academic fans manufactured, all approved by Frank Herbert, were fascinating. If only they had been allowed to stand.

Alas, there was money to be made by continuing to publish Dune novels, thus we were gifted with the utterly crap Duniverse exploited by Frank Herbert’s son Brian in later ham fisted prequels which not only plod but which routinely provide major plot spoilers for events which are supposedly revealed after long reflection and detection in the original novels. The various conflicts between the Duniverse as envisaged by McNelly et al and the Duniverse as twisted by Brian Herbert are attempted to be spun here.

Re- Dune. In the miniseries, Paul sucked. I liked Chani though.

Princess Irulan’s been lucky with her actresses.

I’ve always thought Stephenson appears to have read too much Pynchon. Cryptonomicon worked as Pynchon-light but the Baroque cycle needed him to actually be Pynchon, rather than simply also knowing about mathematics and history. Some nice ideas but about enough for the first chapter of Mason & Dixon rather than a whole trilogy.

As to Heinlein, who was briefly mentioned, has anyone else actually read his last book “To Sail beyond the Sunset”? Running through his work from “Stranger in a Strange Land” onwards was this sexual libertarian streak. Anarchist utopia, usually involving some portion of the family of Lazarus Long, where everyone has a large amount of pleasant and guilt free sex. Often with people who they are quite closely related to. The last book used a part of this same family but set it in 20th century America. The connection to the utopias was kept by using related characters but the book became almost entirely about transferring this utopian sexuality to a real world setting. The long description of mum listening to the kids downstairs kind of killed Heinlein for me at 15.

Mind you, if Mieville doesn’t satisfy your yen for collectivist SciFi, even once you have read his book on the Marxist theory of international law, I whole heartedly suggest Ken MacLeod.

Speaking of good death scenes; I loved the way the Thing met her end (although I would have preferred she hadn’t died at all) and of course nothing can really beat being eaten by owls for dramatic departures. Since that german paraglider almost froze to death in an updraft however, I have had to change my preferred mode of death from being struck by lightening to being struck by lightening while paragliding into the teeth of a storm.

P.S. As someone above invoked Sting in Lynch’s steampunk vision of Dune, I am now compelled to post The Bat.

Ha that is bang on the money.
Gilliam would be perfect. But he needs some sort of collaborator to contain the sprawl a bit. I think I read that the most expensive sequence of Grimm ended up on the cutting room floor. I loved the young woman who plated Jane Eyre in the most recent Beeb adaptation. Would she do for Fuschia?

And for those of you wondering what the thickpeakydustyfuck we’re talking about, this is not too shabby an online introduction to one of the most original yet weirdly earthed artist/writers spawned out of that great gray slut England in the last century

If anyone but Guilliam had made that movie, we’d be applauding like stink. But poor old Terry has set such a high benchmark for himself. Like Kubrick or the Stones, his latest work keeps getting compared to the last one. And so on.

It’s very interesting to read the Pythons Autobiography. At first Guilliam was the rather whacky and somewhat resented yank outsider foisted upon all the hard-nosed comedy writing professional Oxbridge chaps. But by the end, they’re all admitting he’s their personal favourite Python and the one true artist for the ages among them.

he may have been a good choice.

He was pretty spiffy in Lynch’s Dune…