Pick up the nearest book to you.
Turn to page 45.
The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

“Yes,” I say with dignity, “I’ve been through a great deal.”

- Zoo City, Lauren Beukes

It’s a pretty great game – a big open world with some gorgeous environments, and so, so much content to explore. You can’t go a few minutes in the wild without stumbling across another cave, fortress or ruin. And then there are the random encounters with thieves, bandits, wild animals, and, of course, dragons. It has more content than you could see in a single play through, thanks to the choices you get in parts of the game, and a lot of dynamically generated stuff that means you’ll often run into something a little different – enemies that happen to come upon you at the same time might wind up fighting each other as much as they do you.

I’ve barely scratched the main storylines, preferring to see out a lot of the side content first. This game could keep me busy for weeks to come.

A year with lots of epic fantasy, the highlight being Martin’s A Dance with Dragons. Overall, though, my favourite out of these has to be The Troika – I can’t resist something so inventive and different.

Published by the Ministry of Whimsy Press in 1997, it is unfortunately pretty hard to find a copy of these days. And that’s a damn shame.

Here’s a taste.

I know that what I did was wrong and futile. But I’ll make it up to you, Eva. I’ll take you to a quiet little cemetary. We’ll be happy there, among the tombs and the cedars. The snow will bury us for the winter. No one will disturb us. I have a plan. I shall amplify and elaborate you beyond your wildest dream of yourself. With my forceps, clamps, and bone saws, I will inlay your ribs with mercury and thread seashell copper spirals through your thigh bones. I will microtome your shoulder blades and spread them fanwise into angel wings. Disdiscovering physiology, disinventing dissection, I shall dilate your tissues into a gradually expanding cosmos of flesh. At first, none of the work will make sense to us. But I have my reasons. In spring, we’ll burst up through the melting snow, machine and flesh merged, machine forests, flesh cathedrals. So descend, my laser lamp. Set free your razor brilliance. Slice and peel, fold my love into origami, crown her with pulmonary flowers, and let slender bronchial vines wreathe the brow of my dead bride. For then I may brush back her raven-dark hair with a mermaid’s comb, just so, like the dark of the moon. Dear dead Eva, my only friend, this is all as it is meant to be.

I’ve had subscriptions to a couple of magazines in the past – Weird Tales and Electric Velocipede – but only got about halfway through the issues before I stopped finding the time. I know there is a lot of good writing I’m missing in the field of shorter work.

So, a few years late, I’m catching up. Before I move onto another novel I’m going through the unread issues, which are from around 2007-2009, along with one issue of Bull Spec I bought last year after seeing a recommendation.

Who knows, maybe I’ll enjoy it enough to try another subscription, and not waste it.

I don’t read much sci-fi, so it’s taken me a longer time to get around to reading this book than it did for me to read a lot of “classics” on the fantasy end of the spectrum.

I can see where the inadequate and too-predictable comparisons to Lord of the Rings came from – the world-building in Dune is superb. Herbert doesn’t over-rely on it, however, tending to reveal only what’s necessary and leave a lot implied, which is much to his credit; the appendices reveal the depth of detail that underlies the main work.

The plotting and structure of the novel are also strong points, the sense of inevitability of the outcome – carried by the passages from books about Muad’dib, written after the events of the story, that prelude each scene – but the uncertainty of how it will come about mirroring the form of the main character’s own prophetic skill. This is weaker in the first section of the novel, “Dune”, the whole plot of which is chiefly laid out in an early scene where the Baron Harkonnen reveals his plans to his nephew Feyd-Rautha; rather than increasing the dramatic tension of these parts of the book, I found the knowledge worked against it, making the characters actions seem driven by the need to follow this plotline.

The weak point of Dune, I found, was not so much in characterisation, but in the portrayal of these characters. Perhaps it’s the reader’s eye accustomed to modern styles, but I did not feel that Herbert often succeeded in depicting his characters’ emotions and reactions convincingly. Moments of high emotion, such as when Paul believes himself and his mother doomed after the loss of their survival kit, came across as abrupt and unnatural, and often ran against the image given elsewhere of the mental faculties of the characters in question. That particular scene failed in my mind not because the character panicked despite his training, but because Herbert up to that point failed to adequately show the reader Paul as a youth still learning to use his abilities.

With the excellence of the world-building and plotting of the novel, it’s clear to see why Dune is remembered as a classic of science fiction. But I feel it’s more an example of great storytelling than of great writing (though I don’t consider it badly written by a longshot).

This edition is terrible. The text is full of missing punctuation, especially opening quotation marks. There are omitted words. In several places, the words “the”, “that”, “they”, and “them” have been confused.

I’m changing the link on the side to a different edition, even though I have no way of knowing it’s any better.

Just stay away from the Hodder Great Reads edition of Dune.

I will say this, the feel of the book is oddly compressed, with so many storylines essentially about two things: Daenerys, and Stannis. Feast ranged widely, with distinct storylines in Dorne and the Iron Islands, and while much of the story centred on one region of Westeros, the Riverlands, the characters all had their seperate journeys. In Dance, the journeys run in parallel toward the same destination. It makes the two books feel very distinct from one another.