SandChigger

OK. It's unfortunate that Kevin has become the de facto spokesman for the two of them. I'd much rather read more from Brian. He is the Herbert, after all. And his "philosophical reservations" concerning email and the Internet certainly don't help keep down speculation that he's actually pretty close to brain dead and the only writing he does connected with the new books is his name on the checks. I can understand KJA not being able to answer questions about the movie, of course. The ones in that regard I most want answered are: What exactly will you and Brian be doing in connection with the new movie (as co-producers), and How much influence will you have on the content of the screenplay/script? (The hoped-for answers of course being "Very little, the producer labels will just look good on our resum

Thankee! (Sorry, I'm touchy-feeling.)

I'm now usually on Jacurutu, Freakzilla's new site, and The (Almost) Undeleted, run by Omphalos. (I'm blocked from viewing Dune Novels...wink wink, nudge nudge, knowharramean? Block's as good as a blink to a cielago in flight, wot?) I haven't been doing much on Wikipedia recently; it's in fairly good hands for the moment, it seems. I've been terrorizing the Amazon US discussion fora as well. Used to be active on Arrakeen until it went floppy-white-bits up. (Aye, now thar's a tale fer tha tellin', har har! Aye!) I haven't tried contacting Brian directly. He doesn't do email (supposedly). I have exchanged emails with Kimberly Herbert over on MySpace, though. She seems nice enough, and quite devoted to her father. Brian is such a non-entity online due to his Internet phobia. (Byron, his nephew claims it's "philosophical reservations" concerning the Web, but he's just mouthing the official line. And there are those who think that it's all just part of a "oh, look, the eccentric author" PR thing.) I don't really know what to think about him. I've looked through quite a bit of his Timeweb now, and I'm not impressed. Supposedly he's written half of the new Dune books, but I don't see much of the same style in them. (I've looked at more of Kevin's stuff, and I can more easily believe that he's responsible for the majority of the new books.) The great tragedy of the piece is that Brian felt he HAD to work with someone (like he worked with his father at the end) AND that he chose Kevin. (If you read between the lines of the accounts of how they got together, you get a picture of KJA promoting himself with the hardsell.) Ah well.

Like CaoCao in The Three Kingdoms, you need only speakwrite my name to invoke me. :D (Um...I guess that's also said of another equally fictional but less auspicious character, isn't it? Oh well.) I need to put a link to here on my blog. I think I had one on the old Blogger one....

Dunenewt...how did you get in touch with him? Did you get his email and contact him directly, or go through Byron over on Dune Novels? Or contact him through his MySpace account, as I did initially? Just wondering. Also, could you post all of the questions you asked? The ones he DOESN'T answer are usually revealing as well...if you follow my meaning.

Busy being irritating otherwheres, perchance? ;)

Same result, but difference in usage. (Is this board Unicode compliant? Let's see! ... I guess not. Time to cheat....OK, screw it.) 切腹 (seppuku) is the more Chinese word/pronunciation, and the one more commonly used now. The characters mean CUT + STOMACH, and the word includes more of the nuance of the ceremony of the act. 腹切り (hara-kiri) is the more Japanese version, and literally means something like "belly-cutting". I can't remember the last time I heard it actually used. (The Chinese/Japanese distinction is like that between Latin & Greek and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in English.) FWIW.

That's a fairly accurate assessment. :D I exchanged a few emails with KJA, during the course of which he treated me like a total Dune n00b. We tried to do an email interview with him later and he replied with answers he obviously hadn't put any time or thought into. That's when it got PERSONAL. And thus it remains.

Thank you for the welcome. A very astute observation as to my ancestry. Though currently residing in Sietch Tigr, I am originally of the Increduali of Jacurutu. The belief that we are all water stealers is mistaken. To the contrary, I and mine give water daily to the dead thing that Dune has become. Daniel and Marty Omnius and Erasmus?! Spice from worms, not sandtrout?! Every character a mental deficient?! No...Dune is not what it was of old. My eyes flow, my spiracles gasp, my sphincters twitch.... ;)

Dune : Legends :: Herodotus : 300. 8)

Exactly. ;)