Whither next? Name that series!

OK, so we all know that the next book slated for publication in The Dune Chronicles is Sandworms of Dune, the second half of the "Dune 7 Trilogy-in-Two-Volumes", which is to appear in Summer 2007. This is supposed to conclude the chronological development of the series, with all following books to explore various story lines earlier in Duniverse history. A Paul of Dune trilogy, which will describe events between Dune: House Corrino and Dune and between Dune and Dune Messiah, etc., is already announced as "forthcoming" and scheduled for completion by 2010. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have said in interviews that as long as they can keep coming up with entertaining stories to tell, they'll keep writing more books.

In the comments, please list titles (and short descriptions, if you like) of anything you think they might come up with.

I'll start....

Something hard in the morning

I woke up this morning with a hankering for something a little harder than the fare I have consumed of late. So I rummaged around in the "already read" pile and pulled out Dan Simmons' Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction collection. I wanted to reread parts of "Orphans of the Helix", specifically because of its depictions of space travel (FTL but not "vroom-vroom") and artificial intelligences (which I especially enjoyed in this story because the ones described all have names and avatars taken from Japanese literature).

In addition to the general introduction, Simmons also prefaces each story in the collection with comments on how it came to be written. I found the following from the intro to "Orphans" particularly relevant.

... An even smaller subset of readers might know that I've vowed not to write any more novels set in this Hyperion universe for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that I don't want to dilute any existing vitality of the epic in a series of profitable but diminishing-returns-for-the-reader sequels.

Still, I never promised not to return to my Hyperion universe via the occasional short story of even novella-length tale. Readers enjoy such universes and miss them when they're gone (or when the writer who created them is gone forever) and this nostalgia for old reading pleasures is precisely what gives rise to the kind of posthumous franchising–the sharecropping-for-profit of a writer's original vision–that I hate so much in today's publishing. But the occasional short work in an otherwise "completed" universe is my attempt at a compromise between retilling tired fields and completely abandonning the landscape."

I have just today said elsewhere that I do not object to writers creating new works set in "universes" created by others. However, I do think that how much new material is added is important.

Frank Herbert wrote six Dune novels. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have now written seven, with four more officially announced. Statements made by them in interviews and elsewhere indicate that there is currently no end in sight. (Admittedly, the Dune universe was not "completed" by Frank Herbert in his lifetime. Some argue otherwise, but in my opinion "Dune 7", in one book, might have been all that was needed.)

As MacBeth might have asked

"What, will the line stretch out to the crack of Dune?"

The One (and Only One)?

Evidently there is only one. That one will acknowledge as such. Without disclosing what or where it is, of course.

One wonders which it might be, with so many to choose from....

(Or maybe it's something no one "on the outside" has noticed yet?)

Hmm...I love a mystery!

Most Unbelievable "Hunters" Review Blog Quotes: #1

Cue Twilight Zone Theme...

Submitted for your approval, from Trashcan Odorous Jr's Blog:

I truly believe that if someone who had never read the dune novels were to pick up and read this series, from Dune to Hunters of Dune, they would not be able to tell that 'Hunters' was written by a different author(s).

What more can I say?

Arrakeen Night Sky

A while back over on the DN BBS I promised some Celestia screenshots of familiar Terran constellations as they would appear from Arrakis.

As it turned out, a distance of only 300 or so light years was more than enough to completely destroy the familiar patterns....

(Click for larger version. Purple lines connect constituent stars of the named constellations.)

So much for that.

Here's a freebie, Sol from Arrakis:


Probably NOT visible to the naked eye.

Oh well....

Cave ab lectore!

The "dream linguist" knows that comprehension always exceeds production and that it is therefore dangerous to evaluate the capacity of an individual for the former based on the latter. But still, the two are related.

When dealing with someone whose form of expression and use of words is painfully flawed, one naturally has to wonder about the reliability of any pronouncements based on their reading of a text.

Let he who can read do so!

莊周夢蝶 (Zhuāng Zhōu Mèng Dié)

Last night I dreamt I was a balding human linguist with more than a bit of a middle-age spread, teaching Proto-Galach composition and grammar at a smallish national university about an hour north of the legendary Old Terran metropolis of Toh Kiyoh (supposedly the capital of the insular nation of Zhappon, where, by virtue of its excellent facilities and the cosmopolitan, non-religious outlook of the majority of its inhabitants, the Council of Ecumenical Translators chose to meet for their seven-year labors which resulted in the Orange Catholic Bible), but this morning I awoke to the aroma of ChiggerBint brewing spice coffee in the cookinook.

Now I don't know if I am a (usually happy but now slighly confused) desert parasite who has dreamt of being a hu-man, or a (slightly disturbed?) hu-man who is currently dreaming he is a desert parasite and wondering how the hell to coordinate those extra two legs when he tries to get up and walk over to ChiggerBint...who's starting to look good enough to eat!

Ah, what a world this is!