#23470 - 03/24/01 12:51 PM
Re: Fact AND Fiction
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 11/13/00
Posts: 3146
Loc: Northamptonshire, England
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Rapunzel (hi, welcome back) said that Dune by Frank Herbert is (my favorite SF book).
It used to be my favourite when I was in my early twenties (come back Time, all is forgiven, we found the money on the mantelpiece). I found Children of Dune and the subsequent books less interesting - I felt FH had rather lost his way. However, I found the new novel by Frank Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, House Atreides, to be surprisingly good and every bit as well-written as FH's great first and second books. It's the pre-Dune history of some of the Great Houses and how Duke Leto came to leave Caladan for Arrakis. I see that a second prior history book, House Harkonnen, is out, but I'll wait until the normal-format paperback hits the shelves for that. I expect it to be good, too.
However, the real point to this post was if you like imaginative alternative or future reality books such as Dune which wander down labyrinthine and unexpected paths and byways, then you may want to have a look at the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Like Herbert, he's written quite a lot of fairly mediocre stuff, but this trilogy, beginning with The Reality Dysfunction, is exceptional.
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The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#23473 - 03/26/01 10:30 AM
Re: Finding a book
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 09/28/00
Posts: 2888
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You are too scared of E-bay??
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#23474 - 03/26/01 01:23 PM
Re: Fact AND Fiction
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addict
Registered: 12/14/00
Posts: 544
Loc: San Francisco, CA
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Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
A word of warning on this one - the first book is, in my view, a bit too focused on the sex lives of the characters and overly loaded with fairly graphic violence. However, once Hamilton gets that out of his system, the remaining books are really full of some very clever ideas and exciting storytelling.
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#23476 - 03/26/01 09:27 PM
Re: Finding a book: Source
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Pooh-Bah
Registered: 03/14/01
Posts: 2379
Loc: New York City
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Has anyone mentioned ABE (www.abe.com)? It is a large consortium of independent second-hand book dealers. You can find almost anything there. Often, a number of dealers will have what you're looking for and you can choose among various prices, conditions, editions. The only difficulty I've ever had is establishing a correspondence with dealer once you've found them. This should not ordinarily be a problem, though.
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#23477 - 03/26/01 10:42 PM
Re: Finding a book
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/12/00
Posts: 3409
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How do I know they won't send me a piece of junk, and then won't give me my money back? Nuh uh, I'm stayin' away--there's too much junk around here anyway.Hmmm, so that's what KFC stands for - Kentuckienne Fulner's Chicken!   If you're careful, it is quite possible to deal with reputable vendors at eBay - I have not yet had one bad transaction, and have got great deals in the process. ["He needed killin'"emoticon?]
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#23478 - 03/27/01 02:24 AM
Re: A cautionary tale
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 04/09/00
Posts: 3065
Loc: Jakarta
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On another board I sometimes frequent, someone was asking about Azeis II. The poster had bought on e-bay a coin which was said to have been issued by this monarch, who was also alleged to have been one of the three kings who visited the baby Jesus. I had never heard of Azeis II and was unable to find any mention of him anywhere on the Internet except on e-bay auctions. Granted I'm not an expert on monarchies of that period, but I suspect that if he really was issuing coins and was supposed to be one of the three kings, I wouldn't need to be.
Bingley
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Bingley
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