What's the title of this book?

[Happy Monkey]

Originally posted by lumberjim
EDDINGS DID PREQUELS TO THE BELGARIAD?!?!?!?!?
oo oo what're they called?

Belgareth the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. There's also a couple of sequel series, which you probably knew about.

hey, what was that decology that L.Ron Hubbard wrote....that was like crack.

"Mission: Earth", I believe.

[lumberjim]

well, as i said, i was in 11th grade. and i think eddings predated that, even.

and shake your head all you want, but you said:

ohmigod.

not me

[wolf]

While I'm dissing your literary choices I should probably fess up to my guilty pleasures ...

The Survivalist Series by Jerry Ahern
They Call me the Mercenary by Alex Kilgore (who turns out to also be Jerry Ahern)

I also read most of the "Ashes" series by William Johnstone, but well, he was no Jerry Ahern, and the books were kinda tedious ...

In an attempt to reclaim some respect ... right now I'm reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson ... and just finished The Assassin by W.E.B. Griffin, oh wait, maybe that one doesn't help much ...

[lumberjim]

Wolf,
go get "Lamb" by christopher Moore. Very good. lighthearted christian bashing, too, so i know you'll enjoy it.

[tikat]

I've collected several of the Destroyer series and the Horseclans books, but it's more about the hunt through used book stores than the reading.

Are they still (ghost)writing Destroyer? I know the number of books in the series is in the triple digits.

EDIT: I looked it up. The highest I found at Amazon was #134 and ranked a solid 1(one) star in reader reviews.

Hey, I never said they were great literature.

The comic book series, on the other hand, was great.

[wolf]

The early Destroyer books were very clever. I even liked the movie.

I think they started to lose something around the early to mid thirties.

[tikat]

The series went downhill when the original authors stopped writing it.

Not that there weren't some good ghost writers, just that there were some awful ones.

[Pi]

Maybe you want to kill me after this but :
Tolkien only wrote two interesting books : Bilbo the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (even though some parts of it are quite boring), most of the others are highly boring... (but none the less geniously imaginated).
Same for Dune. I read the Dune and started some of the prequels and sequels. Stopped reading after few chapters.

[Happy Monkey]

I tried to read the Silmarilion in elementary school, and couldn't do it. In college, I tried again, and loved it. Unfortunately, the least interesting stuff is at the beginning.

His children's stories are very good, too - Mr Bliss and the Father Christmas Letters were staples of my childhood, and when Roverrandom came out recently, it was very fun to read. Farmer Giles of Ham is funny. I made an abortive attempt to make a Zork-like adventue game out of it when in junior high school.

Now, the massive series of organized notes that his son is putting out is for extreme fans only. I've only read one of those.


As for Dune, I read the first two and gave up on the third in elementary school, and have never gone back to see how I feel about them now.

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by Pi
[B Same for Dune. I read the Dune and started some of the prequels and sequels. Stopped reading after few chapters. [/b]

It was other people that wrote prequels to Dune, and while I did take out House:Harkonen and House:Atredies from the library, I never read them!
What are they like?

I have read every book in the Dune series written by Frank himself.
While the first one was far and away the best, the rest were at least interesting reading for a die-hard fan.


I read Frank Herbert's Destination:Void and don't know why I didn't pass out or give up. It was like reading a two hundred+ page mathematical proof in prose with characters and a sci-fi setting thrown in for no reason. I still don't understand what he wrote, but I was aware that he was deriving theorems from basic facts or axioms and building up to a giant conclusion, but it made no sense to me whatsoever.

After that, I find myself a bit afraid to read the other non-Dune Herbert books.

[tikat]

I got curious and poked around some more. It seems the original Destroyer authors are still active.

I ordered a shirt and a new book of quotes and such from "www.warrenmurphy.com".

I'm not going to order any of the actual books from the series online, though. I prefer to hunt through the stacks in used book stores.

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by Happy Monkey
I made an abortive attempt to make a Zork-like adventue game out of it when in junior high school.

Maze
This is part of a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue^h^h^h^h goblin.
you feel a ring on the floor.

> get ring

[lumberjim]

wow. flashback...
i'm 13 and my dad brings home the first portable computer. must have been 40-50 lbs, with a fold down keyboard. black screen, green letters. it took 5" floppys.

we played a maze game like that ( hall of the mountain king??) for hours on the weekends when we stayed at his place. "you come to the top of a dark stariway that leads into a cave....." somehow this was better than today's far superior games.....like reading a book instead of watching a movie....the imagery is all in your head......

thanks for the flashback.

[Griff]

mmmm... Aztec

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by lumberjim

thanks for the flashback.

You're welcome!

I used to love those text adventure games, but I haven't been able to play one in years. These days every time I try to play one, I get impatient the first moment I get stuck with a puzzle.


Here is a link to details about the Collosal Caves Adventure, the granddaddy of all text games...
http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/

and here is a link to a site you can telnet to to play infocom games as well as a few others like collosal caves all online!

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/

Zork I was awesome! I even remember reading a chose your own adventure book that was based on Zork!


Do you know what XYZZY is?