log

September 7, 2009

Dune

I love the orig­i­nal Dune series. I’m not so hot on the fol­lowups. So I made a rough numer­i­cal analy­sis to find out why.

Occurances of the string ’ had ’ in Dune novels, grouped by author

Book name Total word count Occur­ances of ’ had ’ Aver­age no. of words
between occur­ances
(larg­er is better)
Dune 204145 1085 188.152
Dune Mes­si­ah 75702 544 139.158
Chil­dren of Dune 149377 1201 124.377
Emper­or of Dune 137410 1144 120.113
Heretics of Dune 165154 2026 81.517
Chap­ter­house Dune 143949 1258 114.426
Total for orig­i­nal series 875737 7258 120.658
House Atrei­des 206634 2233 92.536
House Harkon­nen 210188 2378 88.388
Hunters of Dune 146500 1958 74.821
Sand­worms of Dune 144501 1734 83.333
Paul of Dune 158244 1948 81.234
Total for new series 866067 10251 84.486

Sum­ma­tion: Orig­i­nal Dune series had on aver­age a third less ’ had ‘s throughout.

Now I know why it felt like every third sen­tence was a rec­ol­lec­tion. And usu­al­ly of some­thing that sound­ed more inter­est­ing than the cur­rent novel.

posted by Andrew
Filed under at 10:48 pm

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