What I’m Blogging

For the past few months I’ve been reading the pre-Dune series of books by Frank Herbert’s son. I first read the novel when I was in High School. I immediately fell in love with its complexities and rich portrayals of a future that was starkly different from any other science fiction vehicle at the time. The Novels by Frank Herbert were astounding, impressive, masterful, and above all literature.

…Thank goodness I got them from the library…

They say that the apple does not fall far from the tree, however, in this case the apple caught a bad bounce, rolled down a hill and fell into a twenty thousand foot abyss. The offereings of Brian Herbert are in no way comparable to the mastery of his father. Characterizations are shallow, motives are obvious, plots are contrived. All that was fine and noble about the original series, is squandered in these endeavours.

They are instantly forgetable after completion, like a made for TV movie. In the books by Frank, we traveled the desert but our thirst was quenched, in these volumes we are parched from start to finish. Thank goodness I got them from the library and not the book store.

They are in chronological order;
The Butlerian Jihad
The Machine Crusade
The Battle of Corrin
House Atreides
House Harkonnen
House Corrino

It’s the birthday of Joseph Campbell, born in New York City (1904). He saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Riders as a child and decided to learn everything there was to know about Indians. He read his way through the children’s room at his local library by the time he was eleven and started right in on reports from the Bureau of Ethnology.

In college, he turned to studying Arthurian legend. He abandoned a Ph.D. dissertation about Holy Grail stories and went to live in a shack, where for five years he continued to read. In 1949 he published a monumental study of mythology called The Hero With a Thousand Faces; it traced the common theme of the spiritual quest in myth. All sorts of writers found it a treasure trove for their own work, from the poet Robert Bly to the filmmaker George Lucas, who said that without it, he would never have been able to write Star Wars.