Just finished Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune. Opinion a bit mixed. For one, things seemed to be going along at a really steady pace while I wondered when things would come to a head, then they all of a sudden did lickety-split. For another, while I seem to like Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's Dune prequel novels more than most, it's still weird to see them take a supposedly 2.5 page outline for Dune 7 by Frank Herbert and expand it into two books which continue the story while also adding in references to the new backstories they've written in the last decade.
Now I'm basically back to fluff until deciding what to hit next. Right now reading the third Star Trek: Strange New Worlds book. I enjoy these. It's a collection of short stories written by amateurs and compiled by professionals, so it's sort of the best of fanfiction in small enough chunks that you can read an entire story (or more) per sitting.
To add this in since it happened since the last time I wrote in one of these threads, I read Clarke's 2001: A space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. While all were interesting, as a reader it was a bit annoying how he intentionally made them... non-sequels. Basically, if there was something in a past book he wanted to ignore, he'd do so. In one of the forewords or afterwords he basically brushed this as a criticism aside by saying something like "It's fiction, dummy!", but I wish he'd kept things more consistent. Writing 2010 by using the movie version of 2001 as a basis where the book and film differed I could understand, both since the movie is better known and 2010 the book actually started as an exercise in writing a proposal for a film sequel. However, by the time of 3001 he's retconned things so that the events of the previous books happen later. I understand that writing in the 1990s some of those things that were supposed to be in the near future aren't believable, but the events of books named for years no longer supposed to have taken place in those years is just wrong.
