Purging Expanded Dune From My Bookshelf
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
June 30th, 2025
It's not every day that I decide to get rid of part of my collection. I'm a bit of a packrat when it comes to movies and books, to the point where even if I strongly dislike something, there's a good chance that I will keep it in my collection just so I can round it out a little bit. That being said, I think there comes a time in any collector's life where they take a step back, look at some of the things that have built up on their shelves, and think to themselves: "Shit, man. I'm never going to go through any of that stuff again." Case in point: the Dune spin-off novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I spent a long time trying to figure out what I truly thought about these books. Part of me would think of a character or subplot that I remembered enjoying a lot, then the other part of my brain would remember the mountain of frustrating padding and clichés that dwarfs any good idea that tried to stand out from the mess around it. Finally, the negatives outweighed the positives, and I decided to take them off of my shelf and donate them to my local bookstore. Someone out there may enjoy them, but to me, this was a time sink that was in no way worth it in the end.
Before I get into this stack of trash, I figured I'd give a little bit of background on my relationship with the Dune books. I first tried to read Frank Herbert's Dune when I was in high school, and I found it to be pretty hard to get into at the time. I was caught off guard by the fact that the book just throws you into its universe without having much explanation behind its various terms, worlds, political factions, and so on. I put it down within the first couple of chapters, and decided to try it again at a later date. Fast-forward to my senior year of college - I ended up finding an affordable vintage copy of the first book, and I decided to pick it up so I could finally give it a full read. I ended up getting completely engrossed in it, and quickly bought and read the rest of the books that Frank Herbert wrote. There were so many things that made me fall in love with the original series - the complex characters, the lack of a clearly-defined good and evil, the imaginative world of Arrakis and its inhabitants, the tragic tale of the consequences of getting revenge, and the different schools of political and social thought that are constantly at odds over dominance of the universe. It's a very rich series that gets progressively more difficult to understand as the books go on, but on repeat readings, you begin to get a better understanding of the ideas that Herbert was writing about. When I found out that Herbert's son had published several spin-off books that were supposedly based on his father's notes, I thought the idea sounded really intriguing, and I quickly bought almost all of them so I could keep getting my fix of this series that I had come to love so much. Sadly, this feeling didn't last. After about two years of gradually going through the 12 prequel novels, one thought kept repeating itself over and over in my head: "None of this was worth it at all!"
Where do I even begin with the problems that these books have? For one, the sheer length of these things is immense. Frank Herbert's original series consisted of just six books. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's expanded universe is made up of 17 novels and two collections of short stories and novellas. They dwarf the original works in terms of page count and number of installments, and there is no justifiable reason for stretching the series out to this length. Most of these novels are a series of trilogies that gradually build up to where the original novel begins, and there lies my biggest problem with these books - there is absolutely no reason for these stories to be trilogies. Every prequel trilogy could have easily been just two books or one long book each, but they're all filled with a huge amount of padding that adds nothing substantial to the plot. Most of this padding is made up of the authors re-explaining events or ideas that we've read about time and time again, sometimes recapping entire scenes or plotlines from the previous installments. Another cheap way that they pad out the word count is by repeatedly using characters' full names and titles over and over again when it's not necessary, so things such as "Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam" will be used to take up page space at the expense of decent writing.
There are also way too many plotlines going on in each book. The original Dune books featured many warring factions and societies, but the core of the storyline usually revolved around the Atreides family and their consequences on the planet and universe. The other factions are heard from quite a bit, but the focus is generally on just a handful of characters in each book. In the spin-off books, every single faction in the universe has to have a plotline of their own. Every book will feature a subplot for the Atreides, the Harkonnens, the Corrinos, the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen, the Tlelaxu, and so on and so on. Even the school of doctors that is briefly mentioned in the original novel gets a barely-developed subplot about how they came to be. They all feel like the writers were throwing plotlines at a page Jackson Pollock-style without any thought of how they would flow into each other or build to a larger crescendo of action. On top of this, many of the factions are pretty flanderized from their original forms, with the Atreides and Harkonnens reduced to Jedi and Sith stand-ins, and the imperial Corrino family reduced to almost comic relief because of their incompetence. Reading these things is basically akin to wading through thousands of pages of muck with cartoon versions of previously interesting characters while you desperately wait for something interesting to happen.
On top of that, some of the retcons that these books make to the original series is just cringe inducing. The original books make repeated reference to the Butlerian Jihad, an ancient war of mankind against "thinking machines." This was originally implied to be mankind fighting other men who had learned to use computers to control people and society, which led to the overthrowing of these people and the destruction of their machines. Some of these spin-offs detail this conflict, but they take the idea of a war against machines in a completely ridiculous direction. In this version, the "thinking machines" in question are giant cybernetic spiders that are powered by human brains kept in jars. There are also villainous AI characters who are so laughably evil that all they lack is a mustache to twirl as they plan their destruction of mankind. There are uncountable problems that I have with this version of the backstory, and that's not even touching on some of the other contradictions that these books have with the originals. The character of Leto Atreides is revealed to have had a whole other wife and child that is never once mentioned in the original book, there's some sort of a drug operation on the planet Caladan that is also never mentioned, the character of Baron Harkonnen is shown committing a rape that is just gratuitous and cheap, and that's just listing a few of them. The sheer number and frequency of these retcons makes me wonder if the authors had any intention of trying to stay faithful to the original series, or if they just wanted to write their sloppy fanfiction and officially connect it to work that was much better than theirs.
To me, the biggest tragedy about these books is that they were co-written by the original author's son. Brian Herbert had access to copious amounts of notes that his father left behind, and he could have went the route of Christopher Tolkien and published what his father wrote with edits to make it cohesive. Instead, he joined forces with an author known for writing mid-tier Star Wars expanded universe material, and together they spent a couple of decades cheapening and diluting an iconic series into dime store slop. I have no idea how he can look at some of the things that him and his co-writer came up with, compare it to what his father did before, and come to the conclusion that the two belong in the same series together. These guys even wrote a couple of books to conclude the original series after it ended on a cliffhanger because of Frank Herbert's death. Based on the Wikipedia synopsis that I read, all of the problems that I have with the prequels are repeated yet again. There are subplots upon subplots, all of the characters who died in the original works are cloned back to life, the villainous AI constructs make a return for one final attempt at universal domination, and there's a happy ending for characters who were never meant to be inspirational protagonists in the first place. I can't think of a bigger slap in the face than to sandwich your father's most iconic work between your trash fanfiction that only sells because of the title that's slapped on it.
So yeah, that about does it for me. The Dune spin-offs are just a colossal waste of time. If they don't piss you off because of their idiotic retcons, they'll bore you to tears because of their nonstop padding and bland characters. I hope someone at my local bookstore can get some enjoyment out of them, because I'll be damned if I spend my time going through them again. On the plus side, getting rid of these books does open up an entire shelf in my bookcase that I can fill up with much better reading material. I just wish I had spent those two years going through something worthwhile instead of this slop.