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This is a difficult book to review. I had heard that Dune is great and its sequels get progressively worse, although people normally mean the sequels written by Brian Herbert after his father passed away.
I loved Dune - it's a great political thriller with a very epic scope, as well as being a prime example of ecofiction since the main driving force behind everyone's political maneuvers is keeping the right ecosystem intact to control the melange or spice. It's fun and deep and, while not exactly fast-paced, it's riveting and very easy to get through. I kept rooting for Duke Leto even though we knew from the start that he wasn't going to be around long. We're very rarely privy to the characters' inner voices, but characterisation is good enough that we get a strong sense of who's who and why they're doing what they're doing even though the exact steps of the plan might be a bit opaque to us. It also works as sci-fi in that it introduces a lot of concepts and slang without it ever feeling obtuse. I had some problems with it, mainly with how Herbert linked homosexuality and evil in the figure of Baron Harkonnen, but it was a couple of paragraphs that didn't really have an effect beyond painting the Harkonnen as depraved villains. A terrible choice but I figured it was 1965 and people were more openly bigoted, so yeah, wrong, but I could set it aside and not let it taint my views of Dune.
Then came Dune Messiah, much shorter than Dune and with a far narrower scope, but still pretty interesting. Herbert deconstructs the idea of heroes and chosen ones and it's great to see. Normally, stories finish just after the hero raises to power, but what happens when a so-called hero has to wage wars across planets and commit literal genocides to keep his throne? And what happens when everything gets bogged down in bureaucracy? The pacing was a bit off, as everything happens mainly in overlong secret council meetings and inside Paul's head. And everyone likes to wax political and philosophical. So it was a bit more tedious than Dune, but still a pretty strong sci-fi novel with some mysteries at its core and a fitting ending. I really enjoyed reading it.
But then I got to Children of Dune. It starts great. It reminded me of everything I had loved about Dune: the plots, the political intrigues, the ecological problems at its core. I could have read a novel about the life cycle of the worms and how interdependent it is with the surrounding desert. And on top of that it had House Corrino planning an assassination of the Royal Twins, Ghanima and Leto II. I suspected some things were wrong after Alia was done a disservice by being turned into Baron Harkonnen. No one really dies forever in Dune, it would seem, but when the antagonist is as cardboard villainy as Baron Harkonnen, do we really need to destroy a fascinating character such as Alia just to bring him back? It didn’t add anything new to the story; it was a literal replay of the events in Dune. And this time around I paid more attention to the philosophical garbage everyone was spouting – turns out Frank Herbert really liked Freudian and Jungian philosophy so I was quickly done with his supposedly deep tirades. His homophobia and sexism were also pretty overt by his third volume, to the point I dreaded reading the book. Not surprising for a Freud fan, but still. But what I really, really couldn’t stomach were those ramblings of someone who’s gone too far with magic mushrooms. If you enjoy shrooms, you do you, but please know that you haven’t made any breakthroughs about the Truths of the Universe just because you’re high. Herbert’s editor should have protected the Dune legacy by not letting him publish this drivel, but of course Herbert ended up banging his agent at Putnam, so probably the priorities weren’t in the right order.
My advice: stop at Dune or if you must, just after Dune Messiah. Remember, I made the mistake of continuing the series so you don’t have to.
I loved Dune - it's a great political thriller with a very epic scope, as well as being a prime example of ecofiction since the main driving force behind everyone's political maneuvers is keeping the right ecosystem intact to control the melange or spice. It's fun and deep and, while not exactly fast-paced, it's riveting and very easy to get through. I kept rooting for Duke Leto even though we knew from the start that he wasn't going to be around long. We're very rarely privy to the characters' inner voices, but characterisation is good enough that we get a strong sense of who's who and why they're doing what they're doing even though the exact steps of the plan might be a bit opaque to us. It also works as sci-fi in that it introduces a lot of concepts and slang without it ever feeling obtuse. I had some problems with it, mainly with how Herbert linked homosexuality and evil in the figure of Baron Harkonnen, but it was a couple of paragraphs that didn't really have an effect beyond painting the Harkonnen as depraved villains. A terrible choice but I figured it was 1965 and people were more openly bigoted, so yeah, wrong, but I could set it aside and not let it taint my views of Dune.
Then came Dune Messiah, much shorter than Dune and with a far narrower scope, but still pretty interesting. Herbert deconstructs the idea of heroes and chosen ones and it's great to see. Normally, stories finish just after the hero raises to power, but what happens when a so-called hero has to wage wars across planets and commit literal genocides to keep his throne? And what happens when everything gets bogged down in bureaucracy? The pacing was a bit off, as everything happens mainly in overlong secret council meetings and inside Paul's head. And everyone likes to wax political and philosophical. So it was a bit more tedious than Dune, but still a pretty strong sci-fi novel with some mysteries at its core and a fitting ending. I really enjoyed reading it.
But then I got to Children of Dune. It starts great. It reminded me of everything I had loved about Dune: the plots, the political intrigues, the ecological problems at its core. I could have read a novel about the life cycle of the worms and how interdependent it is with the surrounding desert. And on top of that it had House Corrino planning an assassination of the Royal Twins, Ghanima and Leto II. I suspected some things were wrong after Alia was done a disservice by being turned into Baron Harkonnen. No one really dies forever in Dune, it would seem, but when the antagonist is as cardboard villainy as Baron Harkonnen, do we really need to destroy a fascinating character such as Alia just to bring him back? It didn’t add anything new to the story; it was a literal replay of the events in Dune. And this time around I paid more attention to the philosophical garbage everyone was spouting – turns out Frank Herbert really liked Freudian and Jungian philosophy so I was quickly done with his supposedly deep tirades. His homophobia and sexism were also pretty overt by his third volume, to the point I dreaded reading the book. Not surprising for a Freud fan, but still. But what I really, really couldn’t stomach were those ramblings of someone who’s gone too far with magic mushrooms. If you enjoy shrooms, you do you, but please know that you haven’t made any breakthroughs about the Truths of the Universe just because you’re high. Herbert’s editor should have protected the Dune legacy by not letting him publish this drivel, but of course Herbert ended up banging his agent at Putnam, so probably the priorities weren’t in the right order.
My advice: stop at Dune or if you must, just after Dune Messiah. Remember, I made the mistake of continuing the series so you don’t have to.
