“THIS is Dune:
“After assessing the repairs and operable equipment, we’ve worked out a first estimate on operating costs. It’s based naturally on a depreciated figure for a clear safety margin…Under the Harkonnens, maintenance and salaries were held to fourteen percent. We’ll be lucky to make it at thirty percent at first. With reinvestment and growth factors accounted for, including the CHOAM percentage and military costs, our profit margin will be reduced to a very narrow six or seven per cent until we can replace worn-out equipment. We then should be able to boost it up to twelve or fifteen per cent where it belongs.”
This is page 144 of about 800 (not including appendices, plural), so I’m approaching a fifth of the way through the book, and exactly ONE exciting thing has happened.
There’s world-building, and then there’s an economics textbook with a story laid on top of it. This entire thing, so far, is world-building. I have no idea what the point is here. It’s like reading a history textbook, but not anything good like wars or exploration. It’s about tariffs and shit. The Teapot Dome Scandal. Boring nonsense like that.
I’ve compared this novel to two different kinds of textbooks so far.
I’m a dork and all, but I need my dorkiness to be a little more outlandish. This is just like…one of those board games where you harvest stuff and manage resources and so on. It’s a flavor of dork that I just can’t hang with. Like one time I had a peanut-flavored soda. This just wasn’t the soda for me. On any level.
So I’m done reading it. I feel like 18% is a pretty good shot to give a book, and I was just bored. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday. If I’m even more bored and feel that reading about a mining operation on another (boring) planet would decrease my boredom. Maybe when I am interested in reading an explanation of how a special dagger works TWICE. Maybe when I just completely forget that I took a shot at it, try again, and make it to page 175.”