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The Legends Of Dune - Volume 1: The Butlerian Jihad
The book starts out by giving a history of how the Titans took over the "Old Empire" after humanity had lost its drive and had relegated intelligent machines to handle the everyday tasks. The Titans used this lack of drive and the intelligent machine to quickly take over the Old Empire and conquered most of the known galaxy. Free humans rose up at the fringes of the galaxy to resist and push the Titans back, forming "The League of Nobels".
The Titans governed their planets with a increasingly sophisticated AI network and increasing brutality towards their human "slaves". In a bid to rule for centuries, and for possible immortality, the Titans underwent the transfiguration to "cymeks", robots with a human brain. After a century of Titan rule, one of the Titans, in a quest for more free time to indulge in hedonistic activity, relinquished too much control to his intelligent AI network. Eventually the sentient AI network computer evermind, which took the name Ominus, took control of all the Titan controlled planets and formed the "Synchronized Worlds".
After a thousand years of conflict and stalemate between the Synchronized Worlds and the League of Nobels the machines, with coaxing from the Titans, have determined that it is time to "corral" the wild humans and strike out, the logical target, Salusa Secundus, the center of government for the League of Nobels . Being so "unpredictable" to Ominus, the humans, taking huge losses, again resist the machine attacks. In part due to the AI scrambler shield invention of one Tio Holtzman that stops robots, but in an oversight, allowed the Titan cymeks, with their human brains, through.
Reconsidering their tactics, the machines instead move on one of the less vehemently defended planets, an industrial world with an abundance of resources, Giedi Prime. This time the machines manage to knockout the shield generator and take the planet. Once the league hears of this, the endless debates start within their government, as with any democracy, nothing gets done because all the politicians are afraid to commit. All except Serena Butler, she instead organizes a small band to sneak onto Geidi Prime and complete the secondary shield generator. This leads to Serena's capture and eventual transfer to the primary Synchronized World, Earth.
We get to see the first "friction" here between the Atreides and Harkonnen, the Sorceresses of Rossak with their telepathic and telekinetic powers are the beginnings of the Bene Gesserit. The foundation is laid for the Suk doctors, and the cover blurb that I read mentioned the Swordmasters of Ginaz, but I found only a slight mention of the planet Ginaz. Another cover blurb I read mentioned the Mentat school, but there was nothing in this book, one could see the use for them as the League of Nobels did not use any computers.
The book flows very well and I found myself drawn to read more and more. The book does not have the intricate plot within plot layout as the other Dune works, but then this book is being narrated from a historical perspective. Given this, I found most of the characters actions predictable, but I have read all other 9 books, so this being a "historical" narrative, this keeps the characters close to their roles that were hinted at/layed out in the previous novels.
I give credit to Brian Herbert for the foresight of enlisting the help of Kevin J. Anderson in the creation of the Dune "prequels" as he openly admitted that he did not possess all of the "tools" required to under take this project, kudos.
You can purchase The Legends Of Dune - Volume 1 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Yes, Dune, originally published in the '60s stole from Star Wars. Genius.
On your second point, I managed to get to book 5 before quitting I think. Haven't tried re-reading since then, though I still think the first is excellent (and have reread it). If you have knowledge of world religions, Dune becomes a lot cooler incidentally.
This book was mildly interesting in a pure historical context, but the authoring style bordered on being the worst I've ever read.
It was dry, unimaginitive, cluttered and and it just "tried too hard."
I particularly found it annoying that the authors (as with the House * books) found it necessary to explain EVERYTHING. For example, you met a proto-Fremen and blam! He rides the first worm. You see a group of recluse women and BLAM!, they are the proto-Bene Gesserit.
It seemed that the authors went out of their way to CREATE connections, and with that in mind, they felt it necessary to connect to EVERYTHING. I find it hard to believe that in a Galaxy whose history is well over 12,000 years old, that we would see the beginnings of so many familiar settings within a span of a year. I would think they would be stretched out over a greater period of time.
There is so little good sci fiction in the world, its really sad when a decent series continues to be exploited to the point where its fans start to detest hearing about the next sequel.
Dune, while not the best book ever, was incredibly entertaining and some really unique concepts in it.
Pretty soon the Dune series is going to start showing up in the cheesey scifi book section next to the Star Wars and Dragon Lance crap. They should put the Robert Jordan stuff there as well since he seems to be writing an unending exploitation of his first couple of ok books.
Sigh.
At the risk of being moderated as a troll, axis-techno-geek's review wasn't a review at all, but just a summary of the book's contents. Except for the second to last paragraph, there was absolutely no analysis of the book.
It wouldn't be a bad idea for Slashdot to make informal arrangements with a couple contributors who are widely read in science fiction, and who are able to write reviews worthy of what quality sites Salon.com can muster.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I'm not really sure you've ever read anything by Kevin J. Anderson. He's one of the best science fiction authors out there today, including some of his work on the "TV novelization" Star Wars series (I'm assuming you think this genre is stupid or something). He's also written some really good short stories, and is one of the more versatile SciFi authors I've read that is still writing. Was there anything in particular you didn't like about him, or were you just being obnoxious?
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They have a great universe, but neither of them is up to writing in it. It just gives me the feel of a couple of amateurs trying to be clever. They should stick to writing adventure storeis or some such. They can't handle the complexity Dune deserves.
Push the button Max!!!!
I loved the original Dune series, all the way through Chapterhouse, must have read Dune 10+ times, and the entire series 3+ times (I know, no life). However, I was sorely disappointed by House Atreides, and couldn't even finish it. I found the the characters where extremely stiff, black and white, and uninteresting - totally lacking in the passion and subtlety found in the original series.
Anybody out there who had the same reaction to the first of Brian Herbert's Dune books have an opinion of whether things have gotten better or not? This review makes it sound like it might be worth it, but burnt once . . .
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
I'll chime in a 'mee, too' about so about so many key events all happening so long ago, in such a short time.
But I'll add that this seems to be in part a Kevin J Anderson thing. Don't know if Herbert Jr. fought it, went along with it, or encouraged it. But my son is a big Star Wars fan, and reads the novels, including the KJA ones. These types of historical coincidence happen all the time in the Star Wars universe.
Maybe that's why I read only one or two for the 'good father' value, along with only one or two Redwall books a few years earlier.
Fan fiction tends to be that way.
At least in the later Dune (God Emperor of Dune+) novels by Herbert Sr. he had the good sense to allow some drift. Arrakis became Rakis, and other things got a little blurred over 3000 years. Yet we have 10,000 years of greater turmoil (probably leading to poorer bookkeeping) Atriedes, Harkonnen, Butler and the like come through with no corruption, and not even a giant worm to remember the correct spelling and pronunciation.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
After struggling through the Jedi Academy trilogy I've got to say that Kevin J. Anderson isn't close to one of the best sf authors out there today. The plots were bad, the additions were juvenile, the character voices were wrong. It's a shame that the SW franchise has so many books written by him rather than better authors.
I find that most people who like him just haven't read anything by good authors. I do seem to recall a collaboration he did with someone that I didn't hate but I can't remember what it was. So maybe there's hope for him when he has someone riding herd over him, but with fanbeings like you around, it's unlikely he'll be forced to improve.
Why so long? They setup family names, institutions, types of government, nations. All of this is supposed to last 10,000 years?
Very little of any of these last more than a few hundred years just here on earth. Unless their universe goes absolutley stagnant for 10,000 years, what do they expect to be the same?
The rest of the history sounds interesting, but it would be more reasonable to set it less than a thousand years past. At least you could have some expectation that something would last to the "Dune" era in recognizable form.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Wow. What a load of crap.
a.) The EU is more interested in economics than racism. If you think their actions are motivated because of racism over economics you're clueless.
b.) What thesis are we supposed to invalidate? His idiotic comparison to Star Wars which is just stupid. Or his.. uhhh, what? What _IS_ his thesis, that the book doesn't impart some life-changing moral?? Good lord.
Disclaimer: I have only read his original Star Wars novels -- not his novelization of the movies or anything else he's done.
That said, I found his books to be some of the worst Science Fiction I've encountered. I can't blame the setting, since Timothy Zahn did some wonderful things with the same universe. But his stories are predictable and generally nothing more than reincarnations of movie plots with a few variables switched around. His dialogue is cliche and he limits himself to a static interpretation of the characters -- it's as if somebody told him "Yes, you can write a Star Wars novel, but the characters from the movies had better be exactly the same people at the end of the book as they were at the beginning!"
It may be that he was stuck in regurgitation mode after having written novelizations of the of the movies (assuming it was him that did that, I haven't read the book versions of the movies). Unfortunately, that's the same mode I was in after reading his tripe.
I sincerely hope that some of his other work can prove me wrong, that the foulness of his SW novels is the exception and not the rule. But that's one heck of a black mark, if you ask me.
Yes, it's supposed to be a grand, slow-moving epic, sweeping across the millennia.
No, it's not necessarily our own galaxy, or even our own universe for that matter. Things move more slowly. Humanity has slowed its pace, lost some of its pioneering, colonizing will. With the Guild Navigators' prescience, the Universe is open and available. No need to explore.
If you'd read the original books you'd understand that. Leto II's reign, for example. Lasted 3500 years. Not much changed. Planets changed, but attitudes didn't. That was part of the point.
Um, it certainly invalidates this part of his thesis:
If the refutation of a proferred example doesn't weaken a thesis, then of course, a valid example itself cannot strengthen it... and that's just silly: The point of an argument is not the stating of an opinion, bald and without elaboration. It's the marshalling of fact and logic to support your point. Choice of a poor example -- one betraying a certain sloppiness in research -- most definitely does impugn the whole effort, and rightly so.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Do you really know that many people who should know better and actually do? ;)
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
I don't know about is other work, but the prose in "House Atriedes" was close to unreadable. Dreadful. Awful. So bad that the only reason I finished it was that was that I was stuck somewhere with nothing else to read, and I'm a reading addict.
Whether the prose is the fault of K. Anderson or B. Herbert I've no idea, and I'm not likely to find out as I've no intention of wasting my time with anything else by either them unless recommended by someone I trust.
And it's not like I'm a snobbish about such things. Not everyone can be a Simmons or Ellison. But I don't like to flinch while reading.
Kevin Anderson is a cheap Hack. To day that what he writes is Science Fiction is insulting. He spews forth a brand of crap which fits into the stream of crap he's contracted to write for.
Timothy Zahn wrote some StarWars books which were entertaining. Anderson's stuff is boring drivel.
dave
Brian, if you're reading this...
Your father was a very talented man, and we all enjoyed his work tremendously. Dune is my favorite work of SciFi. But...it's your father's work and not yours. If you'd like to please his fans and put a little cash in your own pocket, could you please take a lesson from Christopher Tolkien?
While your work is interesting, it's not Dune and can never be. Dune is the work of Frank Herbert, and none other. So, may I humbly suggest taking his unpublished work and notes and arrange those into a book? I'd throw down cash today for a Dune:Silmarillion type work. I'll bet a lot of other people would too.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Ok, here's the short version of this post: letting Herbert Jr. and Anderson take over the Dune Franchise is a bit like letting Penny Marshall direct the next LOTR movie. We'd all go to see it anyway, but we'd cry because we know how much better Peter Jackson would have made it. So in my opinion, if anyone other than the dearly departed Frank should be allowed to embrace and extend the series, everyone should because surely someone would do a better job than this.
Here's the slightly elongated version:
I am huge Dune fan. I wanted to cry after I read the last line of Chapterhouse Dune, because I knew there would never be anymore, I had read the very last line of the very last dune book.
Well, imagine my surprise when the Dune:House N series appeared. I was torn but hopeful.
Well, the first two were like good fan fiction. They built a little bit of structure for events that happened later, were mostly consistent and pretty fun to read. But nothing like Frank's work.
The third book (House Corrino) was awful. I'll never get those hours back.
What bugs me is that no one else can add to the Dune canon except the copyright holders, so those of us who love it but do not profit from it are forced to watch in horror as the average quality of the official series is diluted.
I haven't yet read the book being reviewed here, and against my better judgment I probably will eventually but I'll be shocked if it's any good. It's just a shame that just because Herbert Jr. shares half a set of genes with Herbert Sr. that we have to be subjected to his inferior fan fiction while other, more talented writers who would like to add to the series can't publish and profit from their potential works for fear of legal reprisal.
Thank you for reading.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
OK, this is an honest question. I'm not trying to troll here.
But I have been a SF/Fantasy fan for most of my life. I am a huge fan of the classics, modern writing, and all of the (good) stuff in between. It should also be mentioned that I'm also not JUST a SF/Fantasy reader either--my reading stretches over a fair range.
That said, Dune is the ONLY book I have EVER failed to finish reading, once I got more than ten pages into it. In fact on my third (and last) attempt, I read some 400 pages of it, and couldn't be bothered to pick it up again.
I found Dune utterly uninvolving. Heavy, ponderous, dull, stilted, and just bloody painful reading. I had no interest in characters, stories, or outcomes in it.
So what am I missing that sequel #9, written by the son of the original author, is getting created at all, let alone cheered enthusiastically?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Locus is the only one of these "accolades" I would take seriously.
RESURRECTION, INC. (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award),
"nominated" for an award no one's ever hard of?
and his novel BLINDFOLD (1996 preliminary Nebula nominee)
Wow! A "preliminary" nominee. What an honour.
[X Files novels] GROUND ZERO was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995" by the readers of SFX magazine.
A novelisation of a TV series was voted "best" by a special effects magazine. Interesting, but what what relation to literature (which is what "books" are) is this?
RUINS hit the New York Times bestseller list, the first X-FILES novel ever to do so, and was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996.
Another TV novelisation. And voted "best" by who? Anyway, he's a hack, 90% of his output is rehashes of Star Wars, X-Files, and similar dreck (fun to watch, but for God's sake why waste your time reading this crap, you can only carry off this stuff with special efects to distract you from how silly it all is) and now he's "helping" the son of a famous real writer to exploit his memory.
The terrible thing is that garbage like this guy churns out is why real SF isn't treated with any respect.
BINGO! Bang on the "money" (the key reason I think it's dragging on)! Back when it first came out in the early 90's (or late 80's??) I enjoyed "The Eye of the World", probably "the great hunt" as well as the 3rd installment.
Speaking of TOR (as someone else mentioned), don't waste your money on Terry Goodkind as he seems to get many of his ideas for the "sword of truth" series from Jordan's "wheel of time" (although one could probably argue all sci-fi/fantasy in the last 15 years is cud [regurgitated & chewed around] - i haven't read enough of it to seriously comment). Heh, maybe they're even the same person?
The series really did peak at Dune Messiah, though. A short, simple story showing how a mob can take a movement intended to better humanity and pervert it into an excuse to kill and destroy anyone they don't like. In the end, it becomes a stunning critique of organized religion; how it can destroy even its leader.
Oh, and I agree with you about Brian Herbert. Shooting's too good for the bastard.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Jerf: have you read The Butlerian Jihad?
No. I don't accept it as canon unless it can prove itself. My point is that IMHO there is no hole in the universe there; not only does it not directly matter what the HM's were fleeing from, we have a very, very good candidate in the form of the independent face dancers. Filling in a non-existant hole in the universe does not impress me as to the possible "canonicity" of the Butlerian Jihad book. In fact, one could make a case that this is just a contradiction, since indeed, they are "filling in" the hole with something other then what the canonical books seem to imply to me.
Not to mention the very act of filling in this "hole" doesn't impress me. Part of the very point of the Scattering was to make humanity too big for any one force to understand (and thereby potentially influence), let alone explain in the span of a book or series of books. This child-like need to "fill in" the universe and make sure everything is explained to the n-th degree betrays much of what makes the Dune universe so cool in the first place.
And it's not just "face dancers"... it's what some independent face dancers became, which were capable of overthrowing their masters, out there in the unregulated chaos that was the Scattering. Goodness only knows how many hundreds of other forces there are at work in the Scattering, which were never even hinted at in the book.
The Scattering was huge...
KJA took the storyline of Timothy Zahn's good "Heir To The Empire" Star Wars books and turned it into Star Trek-esque technobabble, "My goodness, how will Luke and friends save the galaxy today?" and "Oh, let the precocious little tykes fix everything" nonsense. That opened the floodgates for other Trekkish hacks like Vonda N. MacIntyre (yes, the same one that wrote a thousand bad Trek novels) to try their hand at Star Wars. Her "Crystal Star" was particularly wretched, even by the standards of her fellow (I know the word is overused in this post, but it's just so damn appropriate) hacks. Take your average Trek book, switch "Enterprise" for "Millenium Falcon" and throw in a stock "Leia's Children Go Missing Yet Again" sideplot, and that's what you end up with. More technobabble and less plot than your average Voyager episode.
:)
Not even Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston (best known for their original ideas in the X-Wing series) and Zahn's return could salvage the whole steaming pile that is "New Jedi Order".
And as for shameless exploitation of a franchise, I'd like to mention a few Foundation sequels being authorized by Isaac Asimov's estate (ie relatives who want to milk the old guy's corpse for all they can get). Poor Isaac. At least he'll never have to suffer through the eyesore that is "Foundation and Chaos".
Hey, I enjoyed this. Is there any chance for me to be a paid book critic? Anyone hiring?
The error is an important one.
Why? Because it allows the reader to ignore that Dune is an influential work in the genre. Certainly George Lucas borrowed from it liberally. By misunderstanding the relationship of Dune and Star Wars, the main argument (paraphrased: Dune sucks.) is undermined.
I agree with other posters that Dune (Frank Herbert's Dune I'm talking about here, not movies or miniseries or works by other authors) is heavy reading. It is devoid of any sense of humor. Characters tend not so much to speak as to make pronouncements. However, when I first read it, Dune affected me similarly to how LotR seems to affect other people. I was fascinated by the scope of it, the cultures, the technology, the society, and all the themes.
It's interesting to me how similar the criticisms leveled at Dune and LotR are. It's dull. It's slow. It's ponderous. It's overrated. The derivative works of the son don't live up to the original by the father.
But one should not judge the quality of the original work by the derivatives. Dune and LotR are both indicators of this.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Let's see... if we take out "deep, involving plot", what do we have left that will make the book readable?
Obviously, "shallow, uninvolving plot" isn't going to cut it.
Well, maybe if it's well-written, the plot won't matter much. But it would have to be really well-written indeed, to get away with a crappy plot. A "perfectly written" book is probably too much to ask for, but "well-written" would certainly be nice.
You seem to think there's a third alternative, besides "trash" and "well-written with a deep and involving plot". What books would these be? Books that are neither well-written, nor deep and involving, but are still not trash? Can you give any examples of such a book?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
My take... the thing that made Frank Herbert's books great to me is that after I read a book I felt like I'd learned more about myself, humanity, history and the motives of religion. He got into the characters head and really made you understand what cultural things made people tick. His parallels between the modern world and his fantasy world also helped to understand things like trade with scarcity of recources (spice vs. oil) and the power of holy war. Brian Herbert's stories are very entertaining, but not subtle and leave you feeling more like you watched a sitcom than read a worthwhile book. The advantage of this is this book in particular really moves along and perhaps the audience will be bigger since many people, unlike me, didn't like the preachiness and the slow pace of his father's books.
If you don't try to compare their writing styles and just enjoy the book, I think you'll enjoy the read.SPOILER SPOILER - Also, he does flesh out the history of the Fremen somewhat with things like the origin of the Zensunni wanderers, the beginnings of the spice trade, the beginning of the distrust of outsiders, the abandoning peace loving Zensunni tradition and travel into deep desert. The Missionaria Protectiva won't have arrived yet, since the Bene Gesseret hasn't even been founded.
Remember though that in "God: Emperor of Dune" we see that Leto shows to Siona his premonition of a fate waiting mankind. It seems that machines are the threat in that pemonition hence his desire to prepare to scatter mankind so as not to have all of humanity in one place. In the book he hints at machines being a threat again.
Personnally, I don't have time for any of them. Brian is not Frank in either imagination or skill. Not that this is a major insult, Frank was a master.
However, Brian did recently find his father's COMPLETE OUTLINE for Dune 7. So, Brian and Kevin will write that, which I will gladly purchase, after they are done with their prequels. Hurry up guys!
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