Interesting collection of short stories and odds and ends. The Spice World outline adaption gives a lot of insight into the evolution of Dune. The back and forth letters between Herbert and his editor was pretty revealing too.
The short stories were enjoyable. They show that Brian Herbert and KJA can be good in small doses but just like their novels they can long winded as well. The only problem with the short stories is that Whipping Mek takes place in between the Butlerian Jihad books. I haven't read those so I didn't have the knowledge to really enjoy it. Maybe I'll come back to it later.
The excerpts that were cut out or revises for Dune and Dune Messiah weren't bad, but Road to Dune doesn't give much context for the excerpts and unless you recently read the books you might have a hard time remembering where they would've fit in.
I would've preferred an unabridged version of Dune with all the cut material edited back in, kind of like the unabridged version of Stephen King's The Stand.

This was a very entertaining collection of deleted scenes, short stories, and letters about the novel Dune and its sequels. It's definitely one for the Dune enthusiast and probably won't be much use to the casual fan.

"Spice Planet" takes up most of the first half of the book. The cover advertises this as a "new" novel by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson. In reality, it is a short novel length work that they put together based on an outline by Frank Herbert. This outline was a very early draft of what would eventually become Dune. Dubbed "the alternate Dune" novel, this is really an early vision of what might have been. The story itself is much different than what Frank Herbert eveutnally published, though there are many recognizable plot points and characters that are kept in the final product. This story on its own was a fun read. The writing is bad in places and quite adolescent in many spots. It seems to lack any kind of editing, which surprised me since Kevin J. Anderson is also a professional editor as well as author. It read like a rough draft. But that being said, the story was very engaging. The characters had cheesy dialogue, but were otherwise well detailed. Perhaps the parallels to Dune helped make them likable, but "Spice Planet" on its own is an entertaining story. But let's all be thankful that Frank Herbert kept expanding on his ideas and polished them up to produce the true masterpiece that Dune was.

The letters of Frank Herbert and those sent to him about the Dune publishing experience were interesting. It was cool to see the path that the novel took before being accepted and finally published. And you know some of those publishers that rejected the manuscript have to be beating their heads on the wall to this day.

The deleted scenes. Well, I compare this section to the typical part of a DVD that has extras. The scenes that were cut from Dune were interesting to read, but there really wasn't anything awe inspiriing. In short, they were cool to read but the original novel didn't lose anything by having them cut. I won't say the same about the scenes from Dune Messiah, though. The last two "alternate ending" chapters included here were very interesting, beautifully written, and quite surprising. I think the original Dune Messiah ending was just fine as it was, but these two scenes show how it could have ended. They would have been a good way to end the novel as well, except that they would have screwed up the next novel, Children of Dune.

The short stories. Now, these were fun to read. The first one, "A Whisper of Caladan Seas" tells the story of a troop of Atreides fighters in the Harkonnen attack in Dune. It's sad and poignant, while giving an air of mystery and intrigue. The writing is a little jagged, which is understandable as it is the first collaboration work between Brian and Kevin.

The other three short stories deal with the Butlerian Jihad era, occuring some 10,000 years before Dune. These focus on the war between the "thinking machines" and the oppressed humans. I feel sure that Herbert's orginal ideas for this era were a big influence on later works by movie producers such as Battlestar Galactica, The Terminator and The Matrix. These three stories serve as an appetizing introduction to the Legends of Dune series written by Brian & Kevin. As entertaining as they were, I've pushed those books up on my TBR. Great stuff! These stories probably pushed The Road to Dune up to a 4-star rating for me, from the 3-star I was thinking it would get until I read those.

My only complaint about this book: the paperback edition was released about a year later and it included a new short story left out of the hardcover edition: "Sea Child". Those that buy the more expensive hardcovers should not get less than those that wait a year and buy the cheaper edition. The only way I can get that story now is to buy the paperback. I don't want to spend that kind of money on a single short story, and I don't want to give up my copy when I have the entire Dune library in hardcover. They did this again with the release of their next book, Hunters of Dune. They should at least make those stories available for free as ebooks or something to those that bought the hardcovers.

This was a disappointing read. I was looking forward to reading Herbert's article, "They Stopped the Moving Sands" and reading the letters of Frank Herbert sections of this book. Admittedly before starting the book Road to Dune, I was not clear on the fact that the article, "They Stopped the Moving Sands" was not ever completed. But what appears in this book isn’t even an outline, it is merely a letter proposal that was shot down. The letters of Frank Herbert section was very sadly short and not particularly illuminating. The deleted and alternate scenes from the first three Dune novels are not particularly noteworthy. Honestly, one of the only real highlights of the book was Bill Ransom’s preface reflecting on his relationship with Frank Herbert, which was a lovely read. The rest of the tome is Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson fan fiction. Ultimately this book seems like a disappointing cash grab by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, revealing little of Frank Herbert or his road to the creation of one of the greatest novels ever.

If you aren't a die hard fan of the Dune books, both the original or the newer books, this might not interest you. It begins with what had been the origin of Dune, a story or novella, about Duneworld with different characters but a similar feel. It also includes letters from the author and more of a peek into what he had left behind in his notes including alternate endings and deleted scenes from the books that ended up not being used.

Probably it is more accurate to say that I skimmed this, or read it in a cherry-picking sort of way. If Herbert fils and Anderson are to be relied upon, Dune started out as a fairly run-of-the-mill adventure story, with characters who were not nearly as interesting as their final versions.

The most interesting part of this book is probably the correspondence between Herbert père, his agent, and his colleagues. IMO, anyway.

This book is more of an historical document for fans of the great Frank Herbert. It gives you insight into how he created and refined his masterworks.

The book includes two parts. Part one is all about how Frank created, which is an awesome but short read. Then we have the long part two, which is a straight dump of cutting room floor material and old drafts of the Dune series. This material, frankly is just not easy to read.

Granted, it is fascinating to see that Mr. Herbert created in one huge swoop that grand story of Dune. So read ABOUT it. But don't actually READ the rough drafts unless you a real dedicated trooper. Good luck!

The deleted scenes from Dune and Dune Messiah included here are interesting enough, though it's easy to see why they were axed from the final versions. Aside from an alternate ending to Dune Messiah which completely changes the meaning of the story, the rest is exposition which will only draw the interest of the most die hard Dune fans.

Frank's material is in short supply here, with Spice Planet being a "what if" version of the original Dune manuscript written by Brian and Kevin rather than the early draft pages of the original novel for which I was hoping. That being said it still makes for decent entertainment while it lasts. Unfortunately the short stories included here are rendered obsolete by Tales of Dune, which contains them in expanded form with other stories.

Overall, The Road to Dune has some nice fan service for any hardcore Dune fans (especially of the first two books) but doesn't offer much outside of that.

This was interesting. It was a collection of stories. Both fiction and non-fiction. The alternate version of the dune was pretty good. More of a straight science fiction story than dune is. It is a good read. I might recommend reading it after the saga, not in the middle of it. Maybe beforehand.

Me guardo el cuento del final para cuando lea Chapterhouse

I was hoping for a more historical document, but If you enjoy the original books the short stories here are sweet and round. There are like the extras in a dvd: if you enjoyed the original sources, Brian Herbert is much more palatable in small doses. I am used to Tolkien’s work, so I liked it.

This book is interesting because it has a little bit of everything, perhaps most notably a novella-length story that was essentially an early draft of the first Dune book. It had different names and concepts and yet was also recognisable, and that made for a super strange and super enjoyable read.

That novella is probably the highlight here, although there are also some cracking little short stories for you to enjoy and which bridge some of the gaps that naturally came about with the original Dune series. Those are worth checking out as well.

But for me, I think the stuff that I enjoyed the most was the non-fiction sections which took a closer look at how Frank wrote the books in the first place. I think it’s a writer thing; I just love to see how people came up with and executed their ideas. I think it’s a great way of picking up some inspiration, and it also allows you to take a peek behind the curtain, as it were.

Still, there’s only so much to say about this one, and I don’t think it was anywhere near as good as the actual entries in the wider series. It’s really more of a book for the completionists which just brings together a bunch of random stuff that didn’t have a home anywhere else. Being a completionist myself, I’m glad that this thing exists, but taking it objectively as a book, it’s definitely not in the same league as the rest of the Dune saga.

When I finished reading it and looked back at it, it was 100% the novella that stuck with me the most. It was fascinating to see the early ideas for Dune, as well as the way that spice started out as a leisure drug, rather than as something that made navigation possible.

But it was cool because it had a lot of the ideas that later came up, including the classic Duke Leto line where he gave the order to, “Damn the spice, save the men!” Although of course, he wasn’t called Leto Atreides at the time. That didn’t come until later, like Paul’s powers.

This book was in thirds. The first third this book was an "original" edition of Dune, which was quite different from the published book, but an interesting story. The next part was was letters that Frank Herbert wrote, or was written to him from publishers, etc., which I pretty much skipped because it was dull. The final part is missing chapters from Dune, some of which are better that they weren't included in the published book and some were interesting. Finally, they had little short stories that went along with some of the books that were published by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. They were interesting also. All in all, I would not have gotten this one, except that I wanted to read more about Dune. This is the last "new" one I will be reading.