So one could say that Herbert was… prescient? 
When I’d read “Dune”, I didn’t even get the Zensunni reference, 'tho I got the general idea – the obscure, misunderstood religion that controls the source of medicine, power and travel. Then I read “The Butlerian Jihad”, and they actually mentioned the Zenshiite, who, along worth the Zensunni, worshiped Budallah. Then I finally got it, and realized how lame these new novels were. Even if they were based on Fark Herbert’s notes.
More presentscient than prescient, really. The threat image from the arab countries has in essence remained the same for the last forty years, the rise of Israel notwithstanding.
smack:
Wow. I swear I didn’t see muldoonthief 's 3 hour old post when I made mine. Oh well, what he said.
Hey, Frank started that, with the Zensufi in Chapterhouse.
Not to sound stupid, but what religion is Orange?
From “dune.wikia.com”:
"“Orange” appears to be a etymological corruption of the part of the official designation, Koranjiyana, using only the first two syllables and dropping the first consonant. "
I’ll have to look in my copy of Dune Encyclopedia and my various Herbert essays to see if there are any other specifics…
Huh. I always assumed it was used to mean “militant Protestant” (as in the Orange Order).
…and a mini rant on this…
I’ve collected a bunch of FH stuff over the years, and from his author’s notes, essays, and interviews, it is clear that he was not a notetaker or outliner like, for example, Tolkien was. He was a very expository writer, with most novels and stories spilling out onto the page as near complete first drafts.
At most, I believe he would have had a skeleton outline or brainstorm list for a “Dune 7” book, but there’s no way that anything existed that could have provided an honest basis for these prequels.
ISTR in the first BH/KA collaboration, they made a big deal about finding a forgotten safe deposit box that had FH’s notes for Dune 7, including an answer to the big question “What scared the incredibly lethal Honored Matres so much that they retreated in a panic?” No mention of any other source material from FH for the 3 prequel books & the 3 Butlerian Jihad books - they just wanted to milk that cash cow as much as they could.
And frankly, if they did show up with verifiable notes from Frank Herbert showing that he came up with the amusement park with a sandworm ride that had a stockpile of spice beneath it, I’d burn every Herbert book I own.
Please tell me you’re making that up.
Nope. Check it out…
I read Dune when it first came out & remember liking it a lot. Hey, I was a kid. But I never read it again & never did any of the sequels. I’m now bogged down in the last chapters of Children of Dune & am ready to throw in the towel. The writing style does nothing for me…
If I manage to make it through all the Real Frank Herbert books, I’ll surely not risk his son’s Abominations.
Every time someone tells me about events in the Anderson novels, I think to myself, “It can’t get any worse!”
And I’m always wrong.
(I read the very first Herbert fils/Anderson “prequel” and that decided me for the rest.)
I wish I was. Want another one? Spoilered, because it’s slightly… foul:
Remember how Jessica is actually Baron Harkonnen’s daughter? In the prequels, Reverend Mother Mohiam is Jessica’s mother. She blackmails the Baron, who at the time is muscular and athletic, into impregnating her. When the baby turns out sickly & deformed, she returns for another session. This time, the Baron drugs her with some paralysis-inducing drug and rather brutally rapes her. She uses her Reverend Mother super-vaginal powers to develop a drug/disease that she somehow injects/infects into him while he’s raping her, which causes him to become grossly obese. Why she doesn’t use her powers to counteract the paralyzing drug, I don’t recall.
Yes…that’s the one (single, only, unique) “prequel” that I actually read (as the utter blah of the prequels was only made known to me by actually reading that one around the time it came out). I was outraged by not just the stupid plotting, but by the complete ignoring of the Dune Encyclopedia as the history of the Imperium. I know, it’s not a Herbert book, but it was approved by Herbert (pere), and I read it way back in the late 80s, so it was working its way into my brain for a LONG time.
But the DE was already made non-canon by the last few Frank Herbert books.
How so?
Wait, I can’t tell how much of this is joke and how much isn’t.
Do those books go into the origins of the Fremen?
Were there really Zenshiites?
It does and there were. The books written by Herbert’s son weren’t very good, but I actually preferred them to Herbert’s Dune books, which I thought were pretty awful.
None of it was a joke. The books describe in great detail the origins of the Fremen. There were Zenshiites, who worshipped Budallah. Really, there’s no point using one’s imagination to come up with fake slanders against the prequel books. Go read the link that Bridget Burke posted. That’s from the immediate prequels, not the long ago ones, but they are if anything worse. “Garon set his thopter down atop a pile of crisped human remains” indeed.