That speech is pretty embarrassing. Did he really waste 2 minutes of a concert on that nonsense. Frank Herbert is completely within his rights to request that (pretty awful) song doesn't have the same name as his book. As much as I love him , Dickinson can be a cock sometimes. Maiden would, of course, have no issue with any other product being called Iron Maiden... Iron Maiden sue video game company for $2m over Ion Maiden game (not quite the same thing, admittedly)
The world would be SO BORING if we all liked the same stuff. Bring on the variation and different tastes says I That is why i also said in the Blaze/Maiden thread: Don’t let any one (like me) take your enjoyment out of that era. You loved Blaze in Maiden? Good, keep loving it!
That's the only way it can be. I scratch my head at a lot of stuff people like, and dislike, but reading reasons can be very interesting.
Totally. And then you get people freaking out and flaming you because you have a differing opinion. Life's too short to do stupid crap like get mad on the internet, LOL!!
Love To Tame A Land Love the lyrics and had no problem following the lyrics without Dune at the time. I spent some years reading lots of Scifi , Fantasy and playing D&D so it wasn't that big a deal. One of my favorite Maiden Tunes from My favorite Bruce Album. NO complaints from me.
That's your problem, not mine. I think it blows and the reasons are well within the range of my comprehension. Also, I'm very comfortable with my fandom.
I'm not saying Fear of the Dark is awful - in fact, it felt promising back in '92 - but I didn't like it.
"Terrible" is a bit harsh. Here's a quote from the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction: "Much of Herbert's work makes difficult reading. His ideas were genuinely developed concepts, not merely decorative notions, but they were sometimes embodied in excessively complicated plots and articulated in prose which did not always match the level of thinking [...] His best novels, however, were the work of a speculative intellect with few rivals in modern science fiction" It bored the hell out of me as a teenager. Barely made it through the first book. Yet FH had written.... six? Guess it's one of those phenomenons were selected images have proven more influential than the actual thing. Sandworms!
I read some of those Dune books decades ago, and my memory has somewhat faded. Anyway, one of the books told a story of guerrilla hero who performed a successful revolution and then turned into a fascist dictator. So familiar! Sorry for digressing so far away from the theme of this thread!
I think terrible is fair in terms of his actual writing. Again, it's a great space opera with, as you say, lasting images. But his sentences are pretty amateurish, which was pretty common in the golden age of SF and unsurprising considering most of the "grand masters" were not writers by training but came from other, often scientific backgrounds. As the Encyclopedia you quote says, his "prose...did not always match the level of thinking." Which is what I say more bluntly. I, too, couldn't get through it as a kid but found it quite entertaining when I was in my 20s. The sequels were unreadable and I think at a certain point they were mostly written by others, I think maybe his son or some other hack and they just stuck Frank's name on them for credibility. I often try re-reading the SF classics I loved as a kid and am appalled by how awful the writing is. The best most of them achieve is efficiency. Anyway, I'm looking forward to this new Iron Maiden album. I'm sure it will be exactly in line with my expectations.
I love this forum! The discussion about the upcoming Iron Maiden album has turned into a discussion about Frank Herbert and sci-fi in general!
The love for Brave New World is perplexing to me (though if you like it, that's all that really matters). To my ears, as a maiden fan since the late 80s, it's No Prayer Part II at best, and a step backwards for a band that desperately needed to go forwards at that point in time.
To me, BNW was a step forward from both Virtual XI and Fear of the Dark. It absolutely a MASSIVE step backwards from Chemical Wedding, though. A Bruce/Adrian album, but still.
Chemical Wedding is mostly a fantastic album. I admit I've listened to very little metal created since the 80s but overall there is material on CM that is among the best I've heard in the genre. Combine the best of that with the best of Accident of Birth and holy crap.