Ah, fantasy fiction!

How I do enjoy it. =)

What's the difference between fantasy fiction and science fiction? SciFi makes me think of space ships and fantasy of magic. But I'm never certain with these things. . .

Finished another of those Dragonlance books. Raistlin was so the best character through the whole thing. Tasslehoff was second-best. The almost-ending was the best part and the actual ending was the worst, in my opinion, aside for that bit about Raistlin and the tower. I'm not one for the sappy goodbyes - like the end of Lord of the Rings. . . It just doesn't sit well with me when best friends go their separate ways and no matter if they're all cool with it. I'm not. . . Perhaps an indication of how dear I hold my friends. I would hate to have to let go of any of them so long as we're all living. (Slightly odd, seeing as I haven't been able to spend much time in the presence of most of my closest friends.)

But on to the reason for this post: Dune! The writing style was dry but quick. Almost toneless, like most old books are, but there was always so much happening that it couldn't be considered boring, and never too much description. Concise and always moving forward - there were no pauses. It was intriguing and hard to read every word because I wanted to skip through, to find the important things, but whenever I did, I found that I'd missed something. Someone had died. Some important insight had been made. I'd missed something and everything had importance. (Very much unlike WoT where you could skip whole pages.) And then you find yourself wanting the strange abilities of the people in the book - the Bene Gesserit who notice everything and can read people's motives by their tone and body language. Like Sean from Pysch - this isn't magic. This is talent and how cool would it be to be so talented?

Then, of course, there is the mystical element, the one that makes the hero the Hero. That makes him stand out from all the others. Wheel of Time drew something from Dune. There are females of power in Dune and then a young man comes along with a greater power. It's like that in WoT too. I perferred Dune. The females were actually smart in Dune, some of them almost admirable. Definitely meddling and thinking themselves better than others, but less snooty. And of course, my favorite character of the book, Alia, the hero's sister. She's quite awesome, though she's only in the last third of the book and not much at that. And she's only about four. Still my favorite character. Her and Duncan Idaho. Paul was cool, but it took too long for him to become it. Alia was sweet as soon as she entered the scene.

I really liked the little snipets of information between sections. Those were very cool. And they gave good information in a very unique tone.

Anyway. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I think I'm going to get the next one, though I'm not sure if I should yet. . . I've been doing a lot of reading (Dune in two days) and should probably use my new-found venues of imagination, rather than crowd them over with yet more ideas.