Customer Reviews

The Road to Dune

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My main excuse for buying Road to Dune was the roughly 150 pages of deleted scenes, from Dune and Dune Messiah. The cut chapters were interesting, but they were frequently incosistent with the canon material--the original Dune trilogy, and the prequels by Brian and Kevin. Examples:

-Road to Dune has it that the spice was found by men working for Dr. Kynes' father. But, in Dune: House Atreides, Pardot Kynes leaves for Arrakis AFTER spice has already been found and is being spread by merchants througout the galaxy.

-Road to Dune puts Paul's age at his departure to Arrakis at "almost twelve", even though in the first few sentences of the final publication of Dune is age is set as fifteen.

-IRULAN DIES....this is a very unclear chapter, complete with an odd final note by Frank Herbert.

There are other problems, too, which might be confusing, but that's why these scenes weren't published with the original novel. Still, this portion of the book is worth reading, and sheds a small amount of light on the Duneiverse as well (why Paul was inspired by the desert mouse, why the Guild controls the stars without competition). But, it isn't enough to justify spending 25 dollars.

The short stories, written by Brian and Kevin, are adventuresome and worth a look. The first story is set during Dune, but the three that follow are set in the Legends of Dune era. "Hunting Harkonenns" is set before The Butlerian Jihad; "Whipping Mek" is set before The Machine Crusade; and "Faces of a Martyr" is set before The Battle of Corrin.

But, there's a flaw here too. "Whisper of Caladan Seas" has appeared in two other places, and get this: YOU CAN READ THE LEGENDS OF DUNE SHORT STORIES FOR FREE ON DUNENOVELS.COM. No need to spend money on free material.

The novel "Spice Planet" is like a parody of Dune but serious. This was a design for the novel Dune that was abandoned, and features alternate names, and events both vaguely familiar and totally unlike the final publication. It's not all that great, and is certain to confuse the fans. Still, it is interesting.

There are also several letters and articles in here about Frank Herbert's journey to get Dune published. Ironic, that the Supreme Masterpiece (and bestselling novel) of Science Fiction was published by some company that did auto repair manuals.

All in all, the Road to Dune only has something to offer for those of you that have already explored the Dune Universe and still want more. It's not a bad installment, but there are so many actual novels out there...

The Road to Dune contains some fascinating material, but it fell well below my expectations and hopes. Sadly, only about half the book contains primary source material written by Frank Herbert himself.

The book starts with a moving Foreward by Bill Ransom, who co-authored the excellent Pandora novels with Herbert. Anderson and Brian Herbert then introduce what follows, describing the boxes of draft material, letters, outlines and notes that they had to draw upon. My heart rate doubled and my spirit soared as I read this section, thrilled at the prospect of seeing how the Dune series evolved in Herbert's mind, and of gaining greater insight into his fascinating characters and events.

This promise was not to be fulfilled, however. The first section contains "Spice Planet", a novella written by Brian and Kevin based on Frank Herbert's original concept for Dune. As a ahort advemture story, it's quite enjoyable, and there are moments of real tension. However, any traces of Frank Herbert's original work are all but smothered by his chroniclers' writing style and ham-fisted characterization. Even an incomplete collection of outlines, notes and draft chapters would have been preferable to this disappointment.

The next section contains the true Dune source material: Frank Herbert's letters, and unpublished chapters from Dune and Dune Messiah. This section is fascinating as both a study of Herbert's alternative ideas for Dune, and as a historical account of how Dune came to be published. The unpublished chapters' inconsistencies with the published work only makes them more fascinating. This section is only 150 pages long, but it's the pearl in this oyster. If the whole book had consisted of this kind of content, I would have given it five stars.

The final section contains four short stories by Brian Herbert and Anderson - the first set during the events of Dune, the final three set during the authors' Butlerian Jihad trilogy. These stories have no place in a volume about the genesis of Dune, and are, in any case, available for free on the Internet. Why the authors included them is mystifying to me.

This book was so much less than it could have been. It's clear from their introduction that the authors had enormous amounts of source material to draw from. In different hands, we might have received a study of the evolution of the entire Dune story, much as Christopher Tolkien's "History of Middle-Earth" series was a study of his father's work. Instead, we get this.

As one who has read Dune (and its sequels) over and over for 35+years, and rejected the recent prequels becasue of their lack of literary quality and ideas other than formulistic writing, this book is different, and harks back to the real original (or prequel if you prefer). I'm glad the authors used real notes, stories and scenarios in an intelligent and a logical manner. This work offsets the prequels. The original Duneworld presented here had all the outlines of the later book and from what is missing and what is there, one can trace the mental progression and increase in bilogical and related knowledge advances by Mister Herbert as he progressed from Duneworld to Dune. Even for the points that did not show in Duneworld,I felt there were clear hints of the Fremen, the real brutal viciousness of Harkonnens before it was smoothed out to thinking brutishness and a host of other real and almost real subplots. The stories also included later in the book were all Dune, in feel, tone, style, manner and approach. Whether they were Mr. Hebert's or the authors (or some combination thereof as I did not pay attention to whom wrote which), all were clear Dune in feel and approach. Thank you for returning to Dune's roots and given us something else than the made up and generally poor recent prequels. -- A much better job.

This book represents a blending of two approaches to handling the estate of a famous author. The first is the Tolkien Model, which means publishing any scrap of background material and every rough-draft of the classic text. The other model is what H&A have done, which is to continue the franchise with new material and working from old outlines.

I have no problem with this, since canonicity is flexible and, if Herbert had lived, he likely would have finished the series or written prequels (as Lucas has done). The problem is that genius is "often imitated, but never equaled." Of course H&A books are going to be different, because they are different people. Herbert is dead, and since we lack ghola technology, these books (Dune 7 & 8) stay in skeletal outline form and go unwritten, or H&A do what they did.

All complaints about the two prequel series reduce themselves to one complaint: they do not like H&A's style. I like both, since each approach has merit. Indeed, Herbert's later style became plodding, tedious. For example, the tangential exposition on the female Fish Speakers in "God Emperor of Dune" broke my camel's back. It was as unnecessary as Tolkien's exposition on the history of hobbit pipe-weed.

Our first indication that this was not our grandfather's "Dune" was the short story, "A Whispers of Caladan Seas." It was a very good Twilight Zone story, but it was definitely not Dune. It could have happened anywhere and anytime to anyone (Captain James Kirk or Captain James West), and had nothing to do with mélange and messianism. This was a taste of things to come.

As the "Prelude to Dune" series shows, H&A like Duke Leto I. So do I. He is far more energetic than the ponderous Muad'Dib. By not being THE CHOSEN ONE, he had the freedom to actually be a human: fallible and heroic. They transfer this same energy to the rough draft "Dune World."

Parenthetically, "Dune World" is quite an oddity. It is a "rewrite" of the Dune story, but it is based on earlier draft, and is in H&A's style. As I make clear, I like their style for what it is, but "Dune World" is merely a fun book, nothing more. It lacks depth and the existential longing that makes "Dune" a work of genius. In this case, I heartily agree with their Critics.

The key difference is that "Dune World" has ethical characters, while "Dune" has spiritual--even religious--characters. This is a subtle but important point, because ethics is not religion. Religion has an ethical component (i.e. the Sermon on the Mount), but ethics does not necessarily imply the supernatural, as with Confucianism. So what we are reading are merely triumphant stoics, but not mangled messiahs.

I found the excised chapters interesting, and would have liked to have better explanation where they originally fit. This is complicated because Herbert eschewed numbering the chapters--weird. Maybe it is time for a critical/annotated version of "Dune." (Hint! Hint!)

I'm glad that they included the "Legends of Dune" link stories, since they are H&A cannon, and they need to be accessible. However, I was disappointed that Herbert's own essay "Dune Genesis" was not reprinted. If it does not belong with the deleted chapters and alternate endings, and relevant correspondence, then where would it belong?

So, the original Herbert material should appease The Critics, while the new H&A material will keep amphibians like me entertained. Not charmed, not enthralled, not moved, but entertained and edified.

In looking at the other reviews, it is clear that everyone who reads this comes to the book with a set of prejudices that completely color their take on this book. So let me begin with that. When I was in fifth grade, I fell madly in love with Arrakis. I've always been much more ambivalent about _Dune_ and its sequels. The world itself is so rich that it feels just as real as the moon in the sky. The characters, however, are all cut from the same power-hungry cloth. They might be good or evil (rarely in between) but they're always striving and scheming. It seems like such a narrow take on the human experience. It was all the more shocking to read Herbert's moving description of the end of his wife's life that follows _Chapterhouse_. The short essay left me with a sense that we readers had been robbed of so much of what _Dune_ could have been.

The narrowness of the characterization turned, in my view, into self-parody in the second generation novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. They're credible pulp fiction but at the end of the day they're nothing more than light adventure stories and as you get older that loses its hold over you. I stopped reading them when I got tired of the homophobia and the machismo.

I found _The Road to Dune_ remaindered, so I bought it on impulse. It's a mixed bag. It contains four separate parts.

The first is an early attempt at the original _Dune_ novel. As an example of campy pulp fun, it's not bad. It has a glaring plot hole that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in the classic version of _Dune_ (but would have to reread to double check). In seeing the evolution of the novel, it also makes sense of some of the less explicable parts of what was ultimately published. The replacement of the Harkonnen with the Atreides on Arrakis always struck me as forced, for instance, but seeing its origins in more of a contest in an `action story' at least gives it some context. My main reaction to this short novel is that it underscoreswhat an accomplishment _Dune_ is. It took an enormous amount of work to create such a vivid world in this `Spice Planet' story. To keep working it and working it into Arrakis was quite the feat.

The second section, rather brief, is a series of letters about the publication of _Dune_. That the novel had such difficult getting published is the stuff of science fiction legend, but the actual story is more interesting than I expected. I hadn't realized that the major objection was really to the length of the novel --- it doesn't seem THAT long by today's standards --- or that a number of the publishers who rejected it had a sixth sense that they were making a mistake.

Unless you put the fanatic back into fan or have read _Dune_ or _Dune Messiah_ recently, the deleted scenes that make up the third part of the book generally deal with such minor points and are so hard to put into the time line that they seem like random minutiae. The alternate endings to _Dune Messiah_ are the arguable exception.

The fourth section is four stories by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson that others have criticized for already being available for free online. I wouldn't want to read something that long online myself , so their inclusion doesn't seem so baffling to me. One is set during _Dune_; the others are based on the Butlerian Jihad thousands of years before the events of June. My main sense of these stories is that their quality is similar to Herbert and Anderson's other Dune pieces. So if you like their novels, you'll probably like them. If you've gotten to the point where the relentless violence and scheming seems old or the one-dimensional characterization isn't worth your time, then you won't.
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This review is based on a remaindered trade paperback edition. After having written the review, I realized that it appears to be a UK edition.

If I weren't such a Dune fanatic, I wouldn't have read this book. Although Brian and Kevin's writing has gotten better over the years, this book is still nothing but a disappointing continuation of a stellar legacy.

The introduction and excerpts from Dune and Dune Messiah were
fascinating, as was the process of the first book actually being
published, but only serially to start with! Again, the younger
generation's works I can take or leave. However, they do explain how
they were working from a ton of material that Frank left, and how they
went through it, scanned it so they could search it, etc. If you don't
like any of the other 'new' sequels, this one is certainly worth
checking out.

It also includes a 'proto' Dune novel, much shorter, that Herbert shelved and turned into his masterpiece.

Certainly worth a look.

Although, Frank Herbert's son and his writing partner did include interesting material about how Dune was published, the only writing which was excellent were the previously unprinted sections of the first Dune trilogy which were omitted from the published versions. Unfortunately, Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson don't have the same flair for language that Frank Herbert did. Their writing is flat, sort of like comparing a comic strip to a modern animation. I was really bored by their attempt to flesh out F. Herbert's early attempt at Dune. Frank Herbert's Dune series was literature, not so with young Herbert & Anderson.

This book has two major components the small portion that was actually written by Frank Herbert and the vast majority that was actually written by Frank and Brian. The earlier draft of the story has many cool similarities to the Dune that was eventually produced. The two that stand out the most for me are that the concept of the FREMEN is completely absent and the original version of the story focused more on the Noblemen father then the noblemen child. While I love the original dune I always felt that Duke Leto was disposed of in a rather convenient and half-baked manner.

I also have to say that the short stories included "Faces of the Martyrs" and "On Caladan Seas" are world's better then any novel length book these two authors have ever produced.

Overall-Not perfect but it is well worth the time.

When reading the reviews I found a lot of criticism about the style of writing. When you compare Frank Herbert's style against his sons and Kevin Anderson all I can stress is the different cultural eras the authors are writing in.

Frank Herbert writes for a world the reads and only has 3 to 4 channels of television available. No amazing special effects in movies, you had to rely on dialogue. Herbert also writes for an educated world. The pinnacle of excellent free education ended in the 1980's. The world Herbert writes for has read all the masters of the English, French, German, Greek, Roman languages...get the picture. I remember reading Homer in High School and Tolkien's Rings Trilogy was something most of us explored sometime in 9th & 10th grade.

Today we have amazing special effects, 500 plus channels of satellite TV, and a world so caught up in itself that it only has time for 30 second sound bites.

If Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson write like screenplays could it be to capture and keep the interest of today's reader. How many of us miss the time when Children played outside, settling down to read a book was not an oddity, but a commonality, and we made decisions after we had read, listened, and explored every side of an issue.

I'd like to thank Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson for taking on the epic that is the Dune Universe. I enjoy their novels and this book gives you an insight on why and how they continue the universe.

On a side note Chilton published automotive repair books and most people worked on their cars, they changed oil, spark plugs, carburetors...etc themselves. We Dune fans owe them a debt of gratitude that they had the foresight to publish Dune.

I first read Dune in the 70's, we waited in line for gas and only on the right day according to our license plate numbers, we celebrated a bicentennial, and had a scandal in the White House, we lived a life outside of the box, and we wanted to change the world...well we changed the world...is it better or worse?...maybe the answer is in Dune itself.

Every decade I read Dune and I discover new depths I had unknowingly missed the 1 through 4 time around. This is a keeper and even though my books are tattered and creased they are loved and a new shiny novel adds itself to the collection ever so often.

Read Dune and fall into the Dune Universe.