The entire exercise is a bait and switch: Chapterhouse ends famously with Marty & Daniel reflecting:"That would've been funny. They have such a hard time accepting that Face Dancers can be independent of them." "I don't see why. It's a natural consequence. They gave us the power to absorb the memories and experiences of other people. Gather enough of those and..." "It's personas we take, Marty." "Whatever. The Masters should've known we would gather enough of them one day to make our own decisions about our own future." (loc. cit. at 432)That and lesser passages tend to suggest that the pair are Evil Shapechangers. Not so fast, however--this new installment doesn't bother to revise that langauge, but simply ignores it in making Marty & Daniel into Evil Robots from the authors' prequels. It's actually extremely annoying. Sure, the Evil Shapechangers are still there, but it's not quite the same.The text at times reads almost like YA, to the extent that too much is explained. Consider the first example from my marginalia: we know that the Chapterhouse no-ship is the Ithaca, and yet we are told what Ithaca is geographically and mythologically, and then: "Similarly, Duncan and his companions needed a place to call home, a safe haven. These people were on their own great odyssey, and without so much as a map or a star chart" (25). Okay, yeah? Numerous other examples might be cited, rapidly moving from merely tedious to somewhat insultingThe real problem is revealed in the selection of narrators. A number of narrators are deployed once or twice, and then die, seemingly for no purpose. The Ithaca ends up with eight perspectives, all major persons in the setting, but virtually no intrigue. It is merely cumulation of narrators for its own sake, or perhaps also for the sake of "Cool! Bashar Teg!!!" Sure, there's factional debates among the passengers, but it's undeveloped.We also get a new Lost Tleilaxu perspective, not on the no-ship, who functions as a breeder until he gets fed to the sligs (and whose chapter is thereafter narrated from the perspective of a deliberately indifferent slig farmer--reckless POV discipline, that). There was no need for this breeder's perspective, as we already had a rogue Evil Shapechanger perspective who interacted closely with the Tleilaxu guy and who actually advances the narrative; the Lost Tleilaxu is merely a set of eyes to let the audience know about developments in the setting (usually redundant) and in the action away from the main part of the story--developments that presumably are important for the finale, but not obviously here.Events certainly happen--genocides, battles, transactions, alliances, betrayals, tortures, sex, drugs, haughty speech, candid introspections, mentat projections, eugenics, worms eating the shit out of idiot characters, weirdnesses, beauty, subversive ethical dilemmas, hypertechnology simultaneous to swordfighting, &c.--it's a friggin' Dune novel, so the normal roster of inventory is present--but the theology, the philosophy, the macro-ecology are not manifest, except as caricature. This is accordingly a platform to bring back all of the original characters as gholas, merge them with the existing post-Leto II cast, and then introduce a new group of power players (including the extremely silly "Oracle of Time"). There are definitely some good bits. Some of the chapter epigraphs are more than competent (unevenly so, however), and there's a great scene where some characters are reading about the life of Paul Atreides, which is described as the "stuff of legend" (327). Very plainly, those readers are reading the same books that we had read already, the original novels of Frank Herbert, which are referred to as epic, genius, fabled, saga, and so on in the Acknowledgments (7) and the Author's Note (9-11), which explains how this installment is based on a secret outline found in a safety deposit box after the father's decease--like Leto II's secret writings, kinda, I guess--stolen by his descendent, Siona, and used by her to assassinate him. Thus this text is part of the proof for both the existence of the self-deconstructing edifice and the freudian desire to kill one's father. Good job? The revelation about the identity of the Honored Matres is definitely kickass--one can certainly see how that concept grows directly out of the fifth and sixth novels of the father. And there's certainly something nifty going on with the copying of persons in this volume. Another annoying bit, though I may be dead wrong, is that the interstellar travel is expressly described numerous times as folding space, which requires spice to accomplish, unless we have fancy & forbidden Ixian machinery or stuff from Beyond the Scattering. IIRC, however, Dune did not deploy folding space at all, but rather explained that the the navigators needed the spice for the purpose of developing sufficiently prescient awareness that they might pilot the Guild ships at FTL speeds. It's an irritating revision that essentially adopts David Lynch's ultra vires film. Recommended only for deliberately indifferent slig farmers, ambulatory axlotl tanks, and cherubic boys with an amazing repertoire of scatological talents.
Originally published on my blog here in February 2007.The original Dune is one of my favourite books, as it is for many science fiction readers. (The blurb for this novel claims that it is the bestselling science fiction novel of all time.) Frank Herbert's own sequels, while good, were not in the same class as this classic and, particularly later on, began to introduce elements which diluted the force of Dune itself. So when Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin J Anderson began producing novels in the Dune universe, expanding on the detailed background to the story, I never bothered to read them, especially after I read some lukewarm reviews. This novel is a bit different: it is a sequel to Chapterhouse: Dune, based on a rediscovered outline by Frank Herbert himself; it will be followed by (at least) two more. This sequel has been something that fans of the series have long wanted to see; Frank Herbert's death made it seem that the loose ends in Chapterhouse Dune would never be cleared up authoritatively.The novel follows three major points of view, following on from the ending of Chapterhouse Dune. One is that of the community centred round Duncan Idaho, fleeing mysterious hunters in a stolen ship; the second is that of the Bene Gesserits left behind on Chapterhouse led by Duncan's wife, attempting to bring about a union with the Honoured Matres to combat an unknown threat from beyond the worlds of the Old Empire. These two are relatively familiar, involving many already established characters. The third is different, being that of a Tleilaxu geneticist, who has to face the twin blows of the defeat of his people by the Honoured Matres (though he himself was part of a group allied with them) and the discovery that the long time Tleilaxu servants, the Face Dances, have developed into creatures far beyond their original design, with their own purposes at odds with their erstwhile masters. While always present, particularly in the last couple of books, the Tleilaxu have never been as close to centre stage in Frank Herbert's work. They become more important thanks to the discovery of a secret held by the Tleilaxu Masters, which the reader of Chapterhouse Dune knows but the other characters only find out halfway through Hunters of Dune. This is that they have cells preserved from famous people of the distant past which can be used to reincarnate them; these people include the principal characters of Dune itself.There is not actually very much plot in Hunters of Dune, particularly compared to the labyrinthine twists and turns of Dune (or even, to a lesser extent, most of Frank Herbert's other novels). It is like the middle novel in many fantasy trilogies, there to keep the traditional number of volumes but just describing relatively uneventful activity between the scene setting of the first and the climax of the third. It covers a longer period of time than the other novels, but I feel that everything in this novel could have more effectively treated as backstory for the later resolution of the saga. For example, it doesn't seem to be important to document the details of the attempts to unite the Honoured Matres and the Bene Gesserit, and anything from this story needed for the future plot of the series could be mentioned in passing.There are problems in this novel which derive from the particular loose ends left in Chapterhouse Dune. It is hard to see just why the characters think that cells from thousands of years in the past are so valuable. I suppose that if someone said they were able to create a clone of Jesus or Mohammed, people would be interested today, and the clones themselves might be made to serve some political purpose. Here, though, the timescales are such that this would be more like resurrecting an Egyptian pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar for their insight into the problems of the Middle East. The Dune universe may be peculiarly static (in the thousands of years that pass during the saga, there are few important technological innovations), but new factions such as the Honoured Matres, and the impossibility of applying the prescience that several of the ancient cloned individuals possess to the majority of the humans alive at this point of the saga make it hard to feel that the contributions the clones could make will be significant. (Obviously the further novels in this conclusion will make a great deal of use of the clones, but it will take a really impressive coup de theatre to convince me that it makes sense.) There are other details which jar as Herbert and Anderson expand on them, which would give things away if I expanded on them.In the end, the central problem in Hunters of Dune is that the lack of an exciting plot proves a difficulty beyond the abilities of the authors. Since the only interest here turns out to be the way that Frank Herbert tied up the loose ends, I would have preferred just to read his outline as he left it and saved myself the time required to read three or more full length novels. Further novels continuing this story will be ones I skim through, say in the local public library, rather than books I buy for re-reading in the future.
What do You think about Hunters Of Dune (2006)?
SPOILERS!There is always something dubious about authors never finishing their works for whatever reason and having someone else take up the mantle. For Frank Herbert, it was his death before completing his mega Dune saga. Sure, the original series had its ups and downs, more ups than downs in my opinion, but could anyone really capture the full, lively, if character-flat, universe that he'd created and then left unresolved? His son, Brian, and Kevin Anderson certainly make a good effort. Using notes Herbert himself had left for a Dune 7 book (with Dune 6 ending with a temple-clawing No! Not this way! effect), Bri and Kev do their best. And they largely succeed. Unfortunately, they carry over the flaws that Frank had been weighed down with and heighten them to a greater degree.This is mostly an issue of characterization. The story itself is pretty damn engaging. There's Kralizec, the unknown Enemy sweeping humanity up before it and exterminating it, the New Sisterhood, and the Honored Matres still duking it out and there's Face Dancers everywhere. Cool, right?What keeps it all from working is the utter lack of character development and personality. There's a few exceptions. Murbella is pretty engaging. The creepy old couple chasing the no-ship is neat. But otherwise everyone else is flat and uninteresting, which is strange considering that almost every character is an uber-badass superhero with freakish weird magical and sexual powers. They're all just, sort of...well, blah. And this gets taken to the nth degree when the stupid old ghola trope comes into play and pretty much every character from every old Dune book gets cloned. There's just something weird about Paul and Jessica Atreides hanging out in a nursery fighting over toys. Whatever.Also, there is just too much name-dropping from Bri & Kev's other Dune attempts and it hampers the narrative, too. There are apparently gasp-worthy names and plots mentioned which, if you haven't read their fifty+ other Dune novels, you won't understand at all. That's why we have Dune Wikis, I guess.Not bad. But not great either. I'll finish off the series, but not a little reluctantly.
—J.M. Hushour
The penultimate chronicle of Dune can be described in four words. The premise of the book, the setting, the whole storyline, the motivations and development of every single character; it all stems from this short sentence: The Enemy is coming.Mother Commander Murbella is preparing the New Sisterhood for war against an unknown foe from the far reaches of space. Mysterious hunters are chasing the escaped no-ship containing the prophet Sheeana and her allies. And in desperation to save his own skin, Scytale, last of the great Tleilaxu Masters of old, comes up with an impossible plan…Hunters of Dune is defined by two things. First by one of the most daring twists in the history of science fiction. Scytale’s plan. It has the potential to be the most utterly ridiculous concept I have ever read, but also the complete opposite. Time will tell.And second, by a chain of important revelations at the end leading up to the answering of the ultimate question:Who is the Enemy?The interesting thing is that most readers familiar with this series will not have heard of the Enemy at all. It was introduced by Frank Herbert in the very last book he wrote before he passed away. And Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have taken the whole thing to a new level, connecting everything so brilliantly I am almost getting angry at the amount of criticism they have received.A Dune book this good hasn’t been published since before Star Wars came into existence.Pre-review:(view spoiler)[Huh? Yes yes yes, five stars, four stars, one star... who cares about the stars?What kind of BOOK does this to me?I'm writing these words after having walked back and forth for fifteen minutes with my arms on top of my head, all the while laughing hysterically. Seriously.The book wasn't even exciting until the last 5%.Ooooooooh, lord.What a fucking horrible revelation, and yet so damnably brilliant.Full review to come. Probably. I could just write it now, as I won't be sleeping much tonight. (hide spoiler)]
—Markus
sigh.Debated whether or not this book deserves even a star, but decided otherwise people will think i forgot to rate it.The characters in this display none of the intelligence or subtlety of the original characters, and the book reads almost like a giant ad for the other Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson books - if you read this having only read the original Dune series you might find yourself a bit lost.Sometimes I wish that I was still tortured with the Chapterhouse cliffhanger instead of being subjected to these sequels.
—Christopher Litsinger
