Acquired Tastes: Tolkien and Herbert

Just as soon as I was ready to return to the daunting pile of papers which currently constitute my very own Annapurna, I stumbled across the startling news that the The Children of Húrin, the posthumous Lord of the Rings novel that Christopher Tolkien spent close to three decades preparing for publication will be released worldwide on April 17, 2007. Appropriately enough, breaking news of this sort got an enthusiastic response from geek haven Fark, where in true geek fashion the responses were largely negative, if only because Tolkien has always been a sort of a rite of passage for all would-be geeks. While it would be interesting to offer a digression on the schismatic qualities of Tolkien's work, that's a post for another day. Instead, here's a sample of the comments that the aforementioned news spawned:

Nerdlinger

I will never claim LOTR is great literature, but seriously, if you are in a bookstore you should pick up the Silmarillion and read a page or two. You will be willing to nominate LOTR for the Nobel Prize after you stop throwing up.

Faethe

You have to be into way sappy stuff. It's cheese. English cheese. Stiltson. Good on everything, but way stinky.

Tolkien is like that.

Oddly enough, the writer who get the raw end of the deal for this particular post was Frank Herbert's son, Brian. To wit:

Paulson

I hope he doesn't follow in the footsteps of Frank Herbert's son. The stuff he pissed out is an abomination to the Dune series and literature in general.

CowboyNinjaD

The new Dune books are pretty good if you ignore the weak writing, unlikely motivations of characters and at least a half-dozen things that contradict the first 100 pages of the original book.

But other than that, they're awesome.

Bring on the whored-out version of LOTR.

theexistent

Brian Herbert could be forgiven his sin of being a piss-poor writer (along with Kevin J. Anderson) if he at least evidenced an understanding of his father's Dune novels. Given that in his first prequel he conflicts with canon in the SECOND FREAKING SENTENCE it was pretty apparent he had no intention of remaining faithful to his father's vision. It also showed up that his lame excuse of writing sequels (he found his father's notes) was absolute BS. I hope there is an afterlife just so his father can give him an epic azz whooping for running such a beautiful universe into the sand.

Picture of The Children of Húrin comes courtesy of Amazon.