Shipgate said:
Cool Dune cake! I'm happy with the cover of the U.S. release that it showed what I'm guessing is a no-ship as opposed to another worm.
I'm curious if you could talk more about the Dune party and what was going on with it?
The Dune party was great; the people who hosted it were great - free cake and food and everything. The party was for the 40th anniversary of Dune / the publication of Road to Dune. Kevin J Anderson spoke, answered questions and raffled off about a million books. (Hades, Halman, Frosty and I all wound up with something - I think the other three got Bhutlerian Jihad books, I got a copy of Dreamer of Dune).
Interesting stuff he mentioned:
* KJA and Brian Herbert have written another short story which will appear in a book called Elemental (from Tor) early next year - it's a book to raise money for tsunami victims, and apparently it has a bunch of other big names too (I know there's a Hammer's Slammers story in it).
* The next two books will be 'Dune 7', divided into Hunters of Dune (next fall) and Sandworms of Dune (fall '07). After that they're doing a 'Paul of Dune' trilogy, which sounds a lot more interesting than I've heard described before - it's going to be written from the perspective of Princess Irrulan-as-biographer filling in the blank parts of Paul's life... the first one is from between House Corrino and Dune, the second one is between Dune and Dune Messiah and he didn't mention anything about a third (if there was a third - it wasn't clear, though he referred to 'Paul of Dune' as the first book in 'a new trilogy' at one point).
They had a bunch of props from the Sci Fi miniserieses that they let us play with - there's a good picture of Frosty and I knifing eachother in the queue somewhere.
The other cool Dune thing that happened (well, Halman and I also had Dean Stockwell sign pictures of Dr. Yueh) is that Kevin J Anderson held a small reading on Sunday where he read the first three work-in-progress chapters of Hunters of Dune. Spoilers:
* The first chapter is Miles Teg watching a recording of the destruction of Dune (which happens between chapters in Heretics), as an excuse to catch readers up on what happens in Heretics and Chapterhouse. It reveals that the no-ship they stole at the end of Chapterhouse has been 'lost' in the folds of space for three years.
* The second is Duncan having a vision and then figurign out how to pilot the no-ship back into normal space.
* The third is Sheena (sp. - years since I read Chapterhouse) watching the sandworms they took with them and ruminating on whether or not Leto II's consciousness is still held in them.
