Having not read all six books of the Dune saga since high school, I decided to reread them earlier this year. Once I approached the cliffhanger ending of Chapterhouse I wanted to see what happened after. I remember reading one or two of the Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson prequels also in high school and it not being that bad. So I went ahead and read the two sequel books (Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune) that were supposedly based on an outline they found for Dune 7.
It should go without saying obviously that this post will contain spoilers for all of the mainline Dune books.
Simple, direct, and missing the point
As soon as I started the very first page of Hunters of Dune, I could immediately this was written by different writers. But the authors had warned me as the reader that they would not be attempting to copy the style of Frank Herbert, so this was to be expected. But it went further than that. Regardless of whether you agree with them, Frank obviously wrote the original Dune books from a certain political point of view and he had something to say. At times characters were just mouthpieces for him to speak through. While captivating on a surface level, the actual plot was a means of exposing and expounding on certain themes.
From the start, the two sequel books are only concerned with the plot and Cool Sci-Fi Tech. Chapters are noticeably much shorter and written in a more standard page-turner style with a little cliffhanger at the end. The overall structure of the novel is a much more basic setup and payoff. So basic sometimes that there are chapter pairs that are just that. And things just happen because they have to happen to get characters to a certain point. There's none of the rich detail or meandering that is present in the original novels. Whereas characters were shown to react through descriptive prose now it is just bluntly stated. There is no subtext or effort required from the reader to get the point, it is all laid out on the page
It all feels like they did find an outline but all they did was expand the bullet points into chapter-length without adding any, well, spice to it. I will expand on this in a bit, but they also seemed to have grossly misinterpreted the themes and meaning of a lot of the originals. Not to mention that multiple characters from their prequels show up as Deus Ex Machinas. It is quite disappointing.
SPECIFIC NARRATIVE AND “LORE” THINGS THAT ANNOYED ME
- The Honored Matres are reduced to being simple victims angry because of the misogynous Tleilaxu who turn the women of their race into brain-dead breeding tanks. It makes them one-dimensional.
- The two robots from the prequels being Daniel and Marty. They were obviously meant to be Face Dancers. While it doesn't do an absolutely terrible job of writing itself out of that snag, it still feels like a silly way to make their prequel books fit into the canon.
- Seaworms and Ultraspice are examples of the worst writing instincts when it comes to upping the stakes for a sequel. Nonsense.
- Harkonnen being innately evil and Atreides being innately good. Did you miss the part where Paul oversaw the death of 61 billion people between Dune and Dune Messiah? Again, oversimplification.
- Duncan Idaho being the “ultimate Kwisatz Haderach” and melding machine and humans. Okay, first of all, a pretty big theme is that charismatic leaders with a lot of power are bad. Second of all, the whole concept of messiah is constantly shown to be made up as a way for people behind the scenes to control the populace. Third of all, a messiah should never lead to a happy ending in Dune. It just pisses all over everything the series was about from the first book.