More dream makers (addendum to a previous review)

A while back I did a review of Charles Platt’s Dream Makers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at Work, a collection of interviews he conducted with numerous famous authors. The particular item I was reviewing was a 1987 hardcover edition that was, I stated at the time, a merger of two previous paperback [...]

The makers of our science fiction dreams

I just finished a fascinating book called Dream Makers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers At Work, by Charles Platt. It’s a book of author profiles based on interviews Platt (an editor and writer himself) conducted in the late 1970’s. The work was originally published in two paperbacks in the early 80’s; [...]

Top 5 imaginary literary works from science fiction

One of the best things an author can do to bring a fictional universe to life, to make it feel vibrant and real, is to give that universe its own literature — and even better, to quote from it. This seems to be common in science fiction, and it’s one of those little flourishes [...]

Brains, bugs, ecology, & entomology from Herbert

Frank Herbert gave us The Green Brain in 1966, right on the heels of the publication of Dune, and the two books are close in more than just chronology. This novel is another expression of Herbert’s deep interest in ecology, which was such a major part of the foundation of Dune. What we [...]

Short clip: Frank Herbert speaks about Dune

Here’s a very short video I found of a television interview with Frank Herbert, the only such video I’ve been able to find. I don’t know the date on this, but I’d guess it’s from sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s. I wish I could find the whole interview, assuming there [...]

Hitting the quality barrier, and bouncing back. Sorry, Frank.

Frank Herbert’s 1968 novel The Santaroga Barrier starts off as a great tantalizing mystery, a puzzle of the strange and unknown, drawing the reader in through the burning desire to find out just what’s going on. Then you start to get some answers, and they’re not very interesting ones, and alas, before the book [...]