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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.
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 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.
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.
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...