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Comment by Bognar | Hacker News Reader

This isn't relevant to the main point of the article, but the paragraph about the power of mythology reminded me of Frank Herbert's Dune. The book does an excellent job of dropping you into a new universe starting with the very first pages. Herbert relentlessly uses new terminology from that universe without explanation, but you gradually learn what the words mean through context. For me this is an immense aid to immersion since you are surrounded by the new universe, similar to learning a new language by living in the country that speaks it.

If you haven't read Dune, go pick it up. It's a great piece of science fiction with a mythical element like the article describes.

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Ursula Le Guin does a similar thing in all the novels of hers I've read. Even character/race descriptions sometimes are only provided piecemeal over the course of the novel rather than all up front. Allowing you to reexamine what you thought you knew or understood about the world and its peoples.

Personally I think it's a cheap story-telling trick.

http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/

>relentlessly uses new terminology from that universe without explanation, but you gradually learn what the words mean through context

Yeah, the same thing holds for most man pages...

William Gibson is really great at doing this as well.

I disagree and I copy paste the comment I made last time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510478):

In the sprawl trilogy, the big black character that gives the hero his mission he's [sic] using a fax machine embedded in the seat of the cab where they first met. A fax machine. That spit out paper with ink on it. It was already old tech and weird when I first read the book 4 years after the published date.

In Dune, they are reading texts on ridulian crystal. When I read it in the 90's I thought "must be some kind of indestructible paper". Herbert didn't describe the item which incidentally allowed the 2000's SciFi series to show ridulian crystal as some kind of a very thin and intelligent screen reader.

Ridulian crystal will never age but FAX machine, e-mail[0], etc will and they will pull you out of that suspension of disbelief state.

With that said, and for what it's worth, I prefer Gibson to Herbert and I dislike made-up name such as `ridulian system`.

[0] But let's not get into __that__ debate.

Fair enough. Haven't read any of the Sprawl trilogy in a while and don't recall the fax machine or Case and the rest of the crew relying on email to communicate. However, now that you've turned my attention to these obvious anachronisms they seem quite jarring.

But to Gibson's credit, many of his inventions were ill defined and had a chance to mutate just like Herbert's terminology and tech. I won't get into the details because I am sure that you already know the obvious ones.

Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?

By the way, why was this post down voted? Valid insight IMO.

I reread Dune recently, for the first time since middle school. It is not as good as I remembered it. It's certainly readable, but it's awkward in places and there are whole sections that barely make sense. Also, much which was probably groundbreaking in the 1960s is now just standard trope. To a contemporary reader (or to me, at least) it seems like an amateur application of a formula, even though it's really the original formula itself in all its Alpha 1 glory, without any subsequent refinements. I think the best way to approach it is as an important cultural artifact, as opposed to a novel you really want to read.

> But to Gibson's credit, many of his inventions were ill defined and had a chance to mutate just like Herbert's terminology and tech. I won't get into the details because I am sure that you already know the obvious ones.

Yes, I also note that - as he stated it himself - the tech and the world he describes in his novels come to look more and more like our own until the blue ant serie where both meet and are the same.

> Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?

I only read the translation (and almost a decade ago) so I won't comment on the style but the plot line still stands on its own as well as the characters, the themes and the ambiance.

I don't remember improvements regarding style over time I'd chalk it up to the translation.

edit: From Herbert I only read Dune and that other book about the God school or factory. I only read Dune because of the Dune I game.

Indeed. It's so annoying seeing how common it is for writers (whether in literature or film/television) spoon feed every little detail to the reader. That blunts the impact of the narrative the same way as explaining a joke ruins it.

Common mistake for beginner writers. Hence the oft quoted but useful aphorism you'll commonly here in fiction writing circles: 'show don't tell'

Sounds rather similar to the way that the *Souls games (Dark Souls, Demons' Souls) present their narrative - as bits and pieces, hidden in an otherwise difficult to understand world.

It's a very effective trick.

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