Has anybody ever met someone who likes the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson books? I figure someone must, since some of the books have been bestsellers.
I thought it was a decent enough adaptation.
I enjoyed whatever I’ve read in the Dune cycle, which is probably most but probably not all. However, my favorite of it all is anything concerning Duncan Idaho, and one of these days I’m going to just tape all his parts and histories into one book and call it good.
The first book is a masterpiece. Its world has a depth to it almost reminiscent of LOTR. After that the quality falls off rapidly. I actually thought Dune Messiah was decent, but nothing special. Children of Dune was readable, but not what I’d call good. God Emperor was an almighty penance to get through. I did not continue further.
Yes, Herbert wrote other stuff that is pretty good, but nothing of the type or of the quality of the original Dune.
I’ve read the whole set about that many times (including rereading the 1-5 just prior to the release of #6 (I had a lot more time for reading in college!)) and I more or less agree. God Emperor is probably my second favorite after the original. Paul swept away the old order by playing the hero; Leto makes sure that the idea of order by force is thoroughly discredited by playing the villain.
Chapterhouse was interesting because it was the only book in the series that had a cliffhanger ending - and then Herbert died. I have no interest in reading Brian Herbert’s prequels/sequels (if he had provided only the sequel to Chapterhouse from Frank’s notes, I would have read that, but the appearance of so many other books suggested that completing his father’s work wasn’t Brian’s goal).
P.S. The original movie of “Dune” is great for MST3k-ing - there’s the moment when the Fremen leader says “A women who can fight like that is worth ten times
her weight in … water” just as if he was thinking “water .. is that the line? Really?”
Or my college roommate’s response to this line “We call it Shai’ hulud” - "because we’ve been taking too many “Qua- hu- ludes”
As Herbert said in Eye: “I could make jokes about Chilton…saying ‘They’ll want to retitle it How to Repair your ornothopter.’”
The editor at Chilton who bought it was Sterling Lanier, who went on to write the science fiction novel Hiero’s Journey. (and, yes, it was published by Chilton first He’d had stories published elsewhere earlier, though.)
Being worth ten times one’s weight in water has become an expression of high praise in my vocabulary.
Lanier then wrote a sequel, Unforsaken Hiero. Then he died before could finish the series, leaving me with all kinds of questions!!
Just read Dune,
Then read The Dosadi Factor, skip the rest, you will thank me.
I’ve read quite a few of them. They are reasonable sci-fi, although nowhere near as good as the originals. They are not as bad as some people here are making them out to be, and I imagine if they’d not been called Dune, but had different names and similar stories, they would have still been successful, and nowhere near as hated as they are. That said, there’s been a few recently that I’m in no rush to read.
I suspect a good many people quietly like them as a guilty pleasure, in the same way that many people actually enjoyed the Star Wars prequels, or Metallica’s recent albums.
I stand by my description of them as fanfiction. When Frank Herbert was writing his books, he was writing stories about social structures, clashing ideologies, the evolution of humanity, etc. The SF setting was to cast it all in a metaphorical light.
Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, on the other hand, are just writing your basic scifi stories and setting them in the Dune universe. None of the themes are there and they’re not trying for anything allegorical. It’s just supposed to be an exciting story. Maybe it’s good fanfiction, but it’s still just fanfiction, and it doesn’t give us what Frank intended to follow Chapterhouse.
I think you mean “The Dosadi Experiment”
I did, thank you, I was going on memory.