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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Now I'm curious, did you ever read Frank Herbert's other novels? I read The White Plague in highschool when I randomly found it in the library, and then I read the WorShip series when I found it in a used book store, and it definitely reinforces the themes of "Mankind is made to suffer" that compose the core of Frank Herbert's world view IMHO.

I've read the human hive one and the trilogy about the evil Brahmin clones. I think Herbert is just not a very good writer, Dune excepted.

I mean, I guess. On the other hand, how many Dunes do you have to write to be consider a good writer? Is one not enough?

One is enough, but two is better to show the first one wasn't a fluke. And some of the later Dune books aren't anything special.

I have Godmakers somewhere but never got around to it. Not familiar with the others. Would you say they’re worth it?

Some parts of the WorShip series cracked me up. Like how Plasteel and Lasguns get reused from Dune (or did Dune reuse them from Worship? I should check the publication dates). It's definitely a lesser work compared to Dune, but I enjoyed it. The last novel IMHO was rather weak, I think it was posthumously finished by his co-writer on the series, Bill Ransom. Very Dues Ex Machina and Utopian, which maybe goes against my statements that Frank Herbert's central ethos is that humans are made to suffer. But maybe not, you'll have to make your own judgement about how in tact the human condition is by the end.

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