Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...there comes a time, in every interview, a lull in the questioning. Then my interviewer pawed the sheet in front of him and snorted, "Well, what books have you read recently?" and then appended, "Why did you waste your time on all this science fiction crap?" and looked up at me expectantly through his reading glasses...
...firmly behind set lips, because on important mornings you can forget to brush your teeth, and I wasn't taking any chances. And it came to pass that I entered Harvard, duly taking a folklore and mythology course (Hum 9b) where I read Dune, Frank Herbert's science fiction novel of ecology and political intrigue, for the fourth time...
Dune was written in 1965, won the Hugo and Nebula awards as best science fiction novel of the year, and rapidly became an underground cult classic. In 1969, a sequel appeared, Dune Messiah, the further adventures of Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, and Emperor of the Fremen. Now Herbert has presented us with another, final tale of Arrakis, the Dune planet--a sort of a sequel to a sequel. Like most sequels, Children of Dune recalls the worst things about the first two books...
THERE CAME ABOUT in the early 1960s a "new wave" in science fiction, much as there had 25 years before when science fiction broke away from Buck Rogers--Flash Gordon space opera. On the crest of the wave--which demanded that science fiction be less technically oriented and more an examination of what human life and relationships would be like in the future--was Herbert's Dune. Dune is a swashbuckler of a novel built around the desperate plight of the imperial family, the Atrides, on Arrakis, and their attempt to win the emperor's throne. With this novel, Herbert...
Herbert followed his blockbuster with trite, undistinguished science fiction hack work before turning to the second Dune book in 1969. Dune Messiah was a less entertaining book than Dune, but something more important than mere entertainment value was missing--it seemed an element of humaneness had gone out of Herbert's writing...