Dune: Battle of Corin reviews?

[NeoDevilbane]

Not a single review yet?

[Chani]

got it friday, todays my first day off work, will have a review for you in a few days!!  looking good so far though, but i probably should have re-read the end of the machine crusade first cos i've found myself frowning to remember little bits...

[Andrew]

Forgot it was released.

Although I thought it always was released in September.

Gonna get it with Dreamer of Dune if I order online.

[Bi-lalKaifa]

It's released in september in the UK, at least, taht's when my local large book shops get their copies. I've been making enquiries for the last few months, and I'm sure they're getting suick of me.

[styx]

It's released in september in the UK, at least, taht's when my local large book shops get their copies. I've been making enquiries for the last few months, and I'm sure they're getting suick of me.

Na it has been out since saturday (28th August) - but well that is pretty much Sept.

Well 100pages into it. So far nice, bit of a memory scratch where it was left at, but there are the convienient reminders.

Not gonna spoil it but so far it has got nasty...

[Andrew]

Not gonna spoil it but so far it has got nasty...

You mean the quality of the book has got nasty, or the subject/plot involves nastyness?

[Beonid]

Anyone know when its out in New Zealand? :)

[styx]

You mean the quality of the book has got nasty, or the subject/plot involves nastyness?

lol a bit of both. same-old same-old slopyness that I saw in the other two Legend books - the biggy on page 130 (of the UK edition, if there is a difference)

SPOILER

[hide]abt Compound-X how it acts on bodies hormones, such as Testosterone and Cholesterol, Cholesterol isnt a hormone, it is along the same hormonal functional path, but at the end (product) - a Hormone acts on the bodies system to change present states, Cholesterol doesnt do that[/hide]

apart from that this book is in an aquard position. The machine crusade

[driftingcloud]

lol a bit of both. same-old same-old slopyness that I saw in the other two Legend books - the biggy on page 130 (of the UK edition, if there is a difference)

SPOILER

[hide]abt Compound-X how it acts on bodies hormones, such as Testosterone and Cholesterol, Cholesterol isnt a hormone, it is along the same hormonal functional path, but at the end (product) - a Hormone acts on the bodies system to change present states, Cholesterol doesnt do that[/hide]

[hide] Cholesterol is a necessary ingredient in the body's manufacture of hormones, such as testosterone, estrogen, progesterone. If cholesterol levels are not high enough, the body can have trouble making sufficient quantities of those hormones (and others) to maintain healthy levels.

[/hide]

Not sure how that applies to the book, as I won't pay money for it and am so burnt out on the other reading the other four books over the last six months that I can't bear any more for a while. So MC and BoC will have to wait for me...lovely to read everyone's opinions ahead of time.

[styx]

That is my point.

If you read that section in the book (when you get round to it) you will see how they are using it in the wrong context. OK they are talking SciFi mumbo jumbo all over the place but when they start talking abt something that is real and around us in that context they need to stick to the facts and they havn't they just made it up.

[HasimirFenring]

Hey, Battle of Corrin is out?  When did that happen?  I'd better go get it...

[Dondo]

Got it, read it, no surprises.    ;)

[hide] As we were all expecting, the origins of most of the groups of later books are explained. Also, I think we were all expecting the big bad for Dune 7 to be hinted at. Again, no surprise, there was one obvious one, and a "not so obvious" one. That's all you're getting from me!  ;)[/hide]

[Vanguard3000]

I won't be getting it until X-Mas, as I'm not willing to shell out forty [of my own] bucks for a novel I doubt I'll enjoy much.

[styx]

I won't be getting it until X-Mas, as I'm not willing to shell out forty [of my own] bucks for a novel I doubt I'll enjoy much.

40buck!!!, you in autrailia? That is the only way it could cost that much? It is

[Vanguard3000]

Err, like my flag implies, I'm from Canada.  And yes, it is $40 here, just like all the preceding books when they came out in hardcover.

[Tio_Holtzmann]

i've just finished it.

like anything written by BH and KJA, expect silly similes (the one about rows of brain-preservation canisters being arranged "like some sort of machine genitalia" made me laugh for about 2 hours - guys, learn to write) and one-dimensional characters, expect for the really really annoying ones.  but i think we were expecting that anyway.

[hide]what pissed me off was that the most destructive movement, the cult of serena, was actually formed from some kind of "religious" experience and was given barely any real explanation.  i had a better argument, but ive forgotten it.  ah well.

i personally dont think the cymeks were defeated too quickly, they were pretty much dead as soon as they decided to hide from both races.

it's as depressing as the last one, with vorian being depressed and wandering, ishmael, being depressed and wandering, and abulurd harkonnen being depressed and....well, on lankiveil.

but as always, for me, erasmus shines in this one.  i think, altho slightly hackneyed, like the entire series, he is at his most human in this book, his interactions with gilbertus are quite touching.  about the only time this series has made me feel any emotion other than extreme annoyance.  apart from the end of book 2.[/hide]

as a series, i think it's been fairly bland.  an imaginative plot, but one that will probably damn dune 7 to a similar fate.  but it did give us some good twists (end of book 2!) and it gave us erasmus.  so i'm happy.

[Chani]

if i'm honest with you, i really enjoyed it.  i love finding out how all these things came about.  i know the writing has its flaws, but i guess we're more judemental because of being such fans of the original.  they're still damn good books (the prequels).  i think it just about tied everything up anyway, and the things it didn't, well we already know what happens!

that was hard to write because i dont want to spoil it for others.

7/10

x

[Dante]

Battle of Corrin.... Battle of Corrin.... I bought it recently, and I haven't finished it yet, but I've got a few things to say anyway now that I'm nearing the end.

It sucks. It is truly, really, absolutely godawfully terrible. Perhaps, and this is some feat, even worse than the other two. The writing is uninspired, the characterisation nonexistant, the plot clumsy and senseless (though unpredictable, I'll give them that); the nuances and subtlties of the original series are completely vacant (but who's really surprised about that?)...

I mean, given some patience and understanding, The Butlerian Jihad could actually have been an ok book in its own right, provided it was not compared to the originals. Machine Crusade was worse. Battle of Corrin has no such bright side. Reading it was a chore. The only part of the book where I even got slightly involved was at the deaths of my three favourite characters (which I will go into more detail below), which, I guess, were perhaps the best written parts of the book in technical terms, if not aesthetic ones.

Now for the real rant, with spoilers:

[hide]Quentin Butler and Vorian Atreides, may you be condemned to the deepest, darkest, coldest, lonliest, smallest, most foul-smelling pit of Hell that the demons of the universe can concieve of!

The Titans were always my favourite characters, always. Not because of any particular skill when they were written about, but because I liked the idea of them, I liked the concept. The greatest twenty minds of the Old Empire. Twenty people capable of overthrowing a multi-planet empire. Cymeks smart and powerful enough to dominate the known universe. And are they given justice? Are they fuck, 'scuse my language.

Take the other books: I mean the death of Ajax was bad enough. How exactly could someone that brilliant and that powerful be defeated by a bunch of disgruntled workers?! Barbarossa should have known better! Xerxes was an idiot, so his death was understandablel; but Hecate? Why on earth go to all the trouble of creating a character like Hecate, only to shred her mind before she does anything of any import?!

But Corrin was even worse. Corrin saw the death of Juno, cut apart like meat after being felled by a tiny dart, or whatever. A tiny, insignificant little projectile caused the death of a woman who had been alive for over a goddamned millennium! And Agamemnon! The greatest General of the Old Empire, with over a thousand years of experience, blithely lets a hundred-year traitor get thst close to him? The man who conquered worlds is killed by being pushed out of a window?! Aaargh! The frustration is killing me, I actually feel physically ill.

And Dante! Dante Dante Dante... Dante was always my favourite. Pragmatic, smart, organised. Dante, the sole survivor of the twenty greatest minds of the Old Empire. Blown up. Just like that.

Now you may be thinking I'm getting too attached to the characters. Probably true. But what really, really, really, really pisses me off about these books, is that none of the characters are given their due. They are all, with the possible exception of Norma Cenva, watered down, half-hearted personas who are killed more regularly than chapters change. The cymeks deserved more! The Titans deserved more than this crap-stew of a trilogy! So did everyone else, but the cymeks mostly. I will loathe the characters that did them in, and I will loathe the books (authors? Maybe) who didn't give them justice.

Now, on to more general matters. What is with these characters? Am I supposed to feel for them? Am I supposed to sympathise, or even empathise with these people? I do empathise with characters in most books, even if I don't like them. But not this book. The characters are flat and wooden, with no depth at all. I hated Rayna Butler before she even got sick. I felt absolutely no remorse when Leronica died, no thrill of joy when Thurr died, I didn't even dislike Thurr. He just didn't inspire anything in me at all, either dislike or admiration. The assassination of Xander was bland and boring, Vorian and Abulurd were dull as dishcloths, Gilbertus was nothing... Omnius (Omnious? Can't remember. Shows how little attention I was paying) went mad because Erasmus suggested he paint... No point. No point at all. And of course I've dealt with the cymeks, who were described as great and powerful beings and then displayed as stupid, na

[Harq al-Harba]

I actually avoided this site for awhile after August, lest the temptation be too great to read spoilers from _The Battle of Corrin_.  Yet it appears that there is little discussion.  I agree with those that could not bring themselves to buy the book -- as with all of the Anderson/Herbert books, I checked it out from the library.  (on a side note, I keep meaning to get back to the original Dune again, but was sidetracked this summer by moving and reading Lord of the Rings for the first time.)  I was never so happy to save $30.00 or so. 

For all of the negatives of this book, allow me to point out some positives.  The authors apparently got the message that readers do not need an ad nauseum reset of every event from the previous books every 20 pages.  The resets were brief and few.  Norma Cenva remained an interesting character (though slightly less so in this book), and Erasmus, as always, is the most human (and, at times, inhuman) of the characters.    Okay, now the spoilers.

[hide]I did like the Cult of Serena, because it seemed to fit in with the one thing that did work in these three novels: the idea of memory and history.  Various factions are trying to shape history, and Quentin (? - a month since I finished the book) and Vorian's efforts to rehabilitate Xavier's reputation seem to sum that up neatly.  I was curious how the "betrayal" would be explained, and it was fitting on the one hand (merely a difference over how to handle the human shields) and yet somehow less of a payoff than I might have suspected.  In a sense it turned so many things upside-down: Vor is more machine at the end than man, the Harkonnen in this incident is more concerned about humans than the Atreides, and Erasmus turns out to be a better father than both.  ???  The issue of memory also extends to the Jihad itself, which becomes reinvigorated by the cult.  In a sense, Ginjo's overall plan is vindicated, and he is still held up to esteem despite his horrific Tleilaxa organ plants.  Each of the virtuous characters gives up part of themselves and the truth for the greater good, and yet none are recognized for it.

As for the rest, a nice turn that an Atreides-outsider, and not a Rossakian "witch", becomes the founder of the Bene Gesserit.  Norma Cenva's fate is straightforward from here (though I am sure Anderson and Herbert will draw in every detail in what has become a franchise more than a series of novels), and the heavy-handedness with which they hint that the mysterious energy sphere mentioned in the House series on the Guild's home planet is clearly Norma.  And apparently Erasumus is the mysterious force that will be encountered by the protagonists in HoD.  (another aside - for the life of me, I can remember precious little from Heretics and Chapterhouse.  I read each within a few months of their release, but can only remember more Duncan Idahos, Honored Matres and the destruction of Dune.  Time to work on the whole cycle again.)  Subtlety is not a strength of these works.

Ishmail remains a complex character, and it seems a bit painful for him to realize towards the end of the book that his friend was ultimately right about the use of violence -- a debatable point -- and he becomes the most vigorous defender of the Zensunni Freemen traditions.  Memory comes about again here, as he never met Selim, but holds up his life and teachings, despite their rejection by the younger generation who seek to profit from spice harvesting.[/hide]

Ultimately, sanctioned or not, I prefer the DE version of events; we were warned from the beginning by FH, however, that truth, memory and history are not all the same thing.  Sorry to go on so long, but I am interested in hearing other views.  If you have not read it, request it from your library, and save your money for collecting hardcover editions of the original six books.

Harq al-Harba

[Sober]

[hide]I did like the Cult of Serena, because it seemed to fit in with the one thing that did work in these three novels: the idea of memory and history.  Various factions are trying to shape history, and Quentin (? - a month since I finished the book) and Vorian's efforts to rehabilitate Xavier's reputation seem to sum that up neatly.  I was curious how the "betrayal" would be explained, and it was fitting on the one hand (merely a difference over how to handle the human shields) and yet somehow less of a payoff than I might have suspected.  In a sense it turned so many things upside-down: Vor is more machine at the end than man, the Harkonnen in this incident is more concerned about humans than the Atreides, and Erasmus turns out to be a better father than both.  ???  The issue of memory also extends to the Jihad itself, which becomes reinvigorated by the cult.  In a sense, Ginjo's overall plan is vindicated, and he is still held up to esteem despite his horrific Tleilaxa organ plants.  Each of the virtuous characters gives up part of themselves and the truth for the greater good, and yet none are recognized for it.

As for the rest, a nice turn that an Atreides-outsider, and not a Rossakian "witch", becomes the founder of the Bene Gesserit.  Norma Cenva's fate is straightforward from here (though I am sure Anderson and Herbert will draw in every detail in what has become a franchise more than a series of novels), and the heavy-handedness with which they hint that the mysterious energy sphere mentioned in the House series on the Guild's home planet is clearly Norma.  And apparently Erasumus is the mysterious force that will be encountered by the protagonists in HoD.  (another aside - for the life of me, I can remember precious little from Heretics and Chapterhouse.  I read each within a few months of their release, but can only remember more Duncan Idahos, Honored Matres and the destruction of Dune.  Time to work on the whole cycle again.)  Subtlety is not a strength of these works.

Ishmail remains a complex character, and it seems a bit painful for him to realize towards the end of the book that his friend was ultimately right about the use of violence -- a debatable point -- and he becomes the most vigorous defender of the Zensunni Freemen traditions.  Memory comes about again here, as he never met Selim, but holds up his life and teachings, despite their rejection by the younger generation who seek to profit from spice harvesting.[/hide]

Ultimately, sanctioned or not, I prefer the DE version of events; we were warned from the beginning by FH, however, that truth, memory and history are not all the same thing.  Sorry to go on so long, but I am interested in hearing other views.  If you have not read it, request it from your library, and save your money for collecting hardcover editions of the original six books.

Harq al-Harba

[hide]It was Abulard and Vorian. :) Sorta weird (or stupid) how Vor could've just stopped the fleet, turned the weapons on and wipe out the robots. I mean, what's the worse that could've happenend? The robots don't get destroyed, maybe a few days earlier? I mean, they couldn't pass through the net around Corrin.

And the woman who ended up founding the BG, was, in fact Atreides, she was one of Vor's granddaughters.

Erasmus was one of the better characters, along with Norma. I REALLY hated Rayna.

how they only took 1 chapter to illustrate the Titan's demise. Ugh. 1 chapter. Well, it was funny, but I don't wanna believe it. C'mon, a simple laser kills Juno and Vor throws Agamemnon off the cliff? At least Dante's death had some sense, although he didn't die fighting.[/hide]

I think it's really obvious what the HMs were running from in Heretics.

[hide]Hint hint, near the actual end of the battle on Corrin.[/hide]

If you tried hard enough, you could probably argue how BH&KJA's Butlerian Jihad could be canon.

[Dante]

Provided you were willing to either wait for a miracle or sell your soul.

[Andrew]

I bought the book in September or October, but have not started to read it yet. Maybe next year. Glad to hear they don't copy and paste what happened in the previous books as much. That I disliked a lot. Frank Herbert's Dune books were meant to be read in order, so why shouldn't the prequels. ie. don't repeat everything that happened in the previous books.

[ordos45]

Well got this for Christmas, and finished it about 4AM this morning because I wasn't willing to let myself leave it unfinished. It was a labor of love to finish this...this...banal and insipid cheapening of the greastest Science Fiction Universae of all time.

I mean really...

[hide]What is with giving York Thurr the wrong treatment so he goes insane, he might be even more dangerous?  And the Ivory Tower Cogitors, I liked those guys, too bad they had to die in a flamboyant attack that shows Agamemnon wants to kill something because he's too incompetent to do anything that matters and kill something with a weapon to defend with!  And Agamemnon's death over the cliff...I'm twitching.[/hide]

[Tako]

well just finished it and I must say it was the best of the trilogie, finely some speed in a story, the first two books took to much time, they just went on and on.

Battle of Corrino gives some answers and some new ways of looking at a story but I would have liked to know more about the founding of the guild , the suk and the mentat schools

forming of the landsraad and the Choam etc. those trivial things I like to know about them.

[Sober]

I found it somewhat ridiculous that all these Dune-era establishments pretty much came by after or during the BJ - BG order, Mentats, Warp travel, etc. I mean, if humans were stagnant in development so long, why the hell did a simple war spark all this development (That also, coincidentally, most never were used for war at all, especially not for the BJ).

You can try to defend it with "what about WW2; the StG44 Assault Rifle, Atomic Bomb, etc.", but remember, all of those are FOR war, even if some lack of development proceeded it.