Revisiting Dune

One of the first posts I ever made for this blog focused on Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction epic Dune, which in many ways is the Science Fiction equivalent to fantasy's The Lord of the Rings or Horror's The Stand - basically it's a big-old book packed with story and intriguing concepts that kept the author coming back and helped to grow a large number of fans for the genre.

Of course, my complaint at the time was that the book was simply too darn big, and that if the author couldn't get his point across in a shorter format he needed to get a new editor.

Last Christmas I received all six of the books included in the recent Penguin Galaxy imprint and as I hadn't read the first two before (The Once and Future King and Stranger in a Strange Land) I felt this year might be a good one to read these titles and revisit some classic SF (also taking a quick side-trip into Isaac Asimov's Foundation series as well).

Reading Dune for the third time, and revisiting it after watching the movie, the SyFy channel miniseries and listening to the original film's soundtrack over and over again, I wasn't sure if there would be much for me this time around, but man was I wrong.

For starters (sorry for the fifty-plus-year spoilers) I had somehow completed ignored the environmentalism focus of the novel (also the fact that Lady Jessica was Baron Harkonnen's daughter - which is stated clearly, multiple times), and furthermore the darker aspects of Paul's rise to glory. For years I had heard from friends and others not to read the rest of the series as each book got worse and worse, but now I have to say I'm pretty interested - maybe not all of the fourteen novels that were written after Herbert's death, but the first five may be added to my science fiction reading list.

A really neat read, and in many ways a great introduction to the genre for newcomers.

Genre Character of the Week: Brad Wolgast

Two years ago I read the Justin Cronin novel The Passage and loved it – the story of a world overrun by vampires was amazing and on a massive scale – the vampire world doesn’t even appear until page 260.  I loved how the story spent a lot of time developing all of its characters and eventually, I chose one of them, Peter Jaxan, as a genre character of the week.

Last week I picked The Passage back up and started re-reading it, as next month it’s sequel The Twelve is coming out and I wanted to brush up on the first story before I dug into the sequel – and along the way I found a character I liked even more than Peter (and I think he is a pretty great guy already).  Brad Wolgast, one of the men who is behind the end of the world, and perhaps one of the men behind it’s rebirth.

It’s tricky to describe what I like best about a character without going into spoilers, but I’ll try my best. Wolgast is a federal agent charged to collect volunteers for a secret government project.  He is recently divorced and carries a sadness with him wherever he goes – what I loved about this character (who largely exists well before page 240 in the book) is just how real he came across to me, a guy doing a job well, but not a job he particularly likes, just biding his time until retirement, and hoping each day will help him get over his failed marriage.

I know I’ve said this before, but honestly, my favourite part of any genre fiction is well-crafted characters, who come across as real people with hopes, dreams and fears.

If you haven’t read the book yet, it is definitely worth the time, although I’ll warn you it’s pretty big, and if you’re anything like me you’ll want to follow it up with the sequel as soon as possible.

Book Review: The Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Stories

Over the last couple weeks I've been re-reading a favourite from my teen years, The Call of Cthulhu and other Werid Stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft, for those who don't know was a prolific horror/pulp writer in the early part of the 20th century, most famous for having creating the story The Call of Cthulhu which introduced to readers the concept of the Old Ones; ancient gods who once ruled the world and one day would do so again.

From the ages of 15 to 18 I read through all of Lovecraft's stories (and a number of his letters) and loved them. The pacing and dialogue were both sometimes lacking and his stories have more than a little racism throughout, but the concepts really resonated with me at the time. As someone moving out of the safe environment of childhood into the frightening and seemingly uncaring world of adults, I found a lot that I could relate to in his works.

Re-Reading the book now was kind of like visiting an old friend after many years - his apartment seems a little smaller, but you keep coming across things that set off jolts of memory from your younger days. The stories themselves are pretty standard Lovecraft fare - our narrator has a friend who has discovered something that does not want to be discovered and pays the price. From my point of view the best short stories of the collection were; The Call of Cthulhu, The Color out of Space, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

If you've never given them a try, keep in mind that the stories can sometimes be difficult to get into, but there is quite a lot of good stuff there for those willing to explore.