fter the recent opening prequel trilogy by Herbert and Anderson, which concerned itself with matters only a generation prior to Frank Herbert's seminal Dune series, the son of Herbert, along with his collaborator, have now launched a second trio of books reaching much further back into the history of Frank Herbert's universe. (Dune: The Machine Crusade and Dune: The Battle of Corrin are forthcoming.)
Some 10 millennia prior to the famous events on Arrakis, the galaxy was a much different place. An empire of evil machine intelligences—some purely robotic, others cyborg fusions—jousts for interstellar domination with a loose alliance of free human worlds. In a "widescreen baroque" manner, Herbert and Anderson chronicle this war, which soon becomes known as the Butlerian Jihad. Using scores of characters across several worlds, they tell a sprawling story of sacrifice, terror, bravery, ingenuity and personal tragedy.
On the capital planet known as Salusa Secundus, Serena Butler and her lover Xavier Harkonnen plan assaults on the preminent cybernetic mastermind known as Omnius, whose copies dominate each of the Synchronized Worlds. On Rossak, the telepathic sorceress Zufa Cenva trains dozens of similar witches as living weapons. Zufa's non-psionic daughter, Norma, a mathematical genius, is recruited by the legendary inventor Tio Holtzman and brought to the planet Poritrin to develop weapons and defenses. On conquered Earth, where millions of slaves labor for their metal rulers, a freakish robot named Erasmus conducts cruel experiments in a vain attempt to understand human psychology. Meanwhile, Vorian Atreides, the fully human offspring of a cyborg Titan named Agamemnon, unthinkingly perpetuates the dominance of the robots. Finally, an outcast orphan named Selim, wandering the deserts of Arrakis, learns a vital secret about the sandworms and the spice that Dune produces.
The world of Giedi Prime falls to Omnius, then is rescued thanks to a plan by Selena. But the heroine of the battle is captured and brought to Earth, falling into Erasmus' hands. Befriended by Vorian, whom she begins to turn away from his lineage, Serena holds out hope of returning to Salusa and Xavier. But the tides of war and rebellion—stoked by a wily slave named Iblis Ginjo—will sweep away all mortal plans.
The roots of Herbert's history revealed
Let us subject this book to the famous "Joe Blog" test: If it appeared under the byline of Joe Blog, without links to any famous series or big-name authors, how would it be critically received? I like to think that an objective reading of this book would find it to be a well-wrought, fairly intricate space opera, with resonant characters for whom we feel affection and empathy.
It's ponderous and slow-moving, like a dreadnought steaming to brandish the flag in the face of unbelievers at some foreign harbor, but that kind of display can be impressive in its own way. Its bite-sized chapters sometimes interfere with extended action, but also conduce to speedy reading. It spells out all its background and assumptions quite handily, without taking for granted reader familiarity. It's a tad old-fashioned, not exhibiting the postmodern stylings or conceptualizations found in the works of such writers as Iain Banks or Alastair Reynolds. But on the whole it's a solid read, evoking a real sense of the grand panorama of history and the expanse of a settled galaxy, as well as presenting a vivid portrait of the clash of civilizations.
But once we discard the Joe Blog perspective, we have to ask how this book—and the rest of the huge Herbert-Anderson project, which will probably amount to more wordage than Frank Herbert ever produced about Dune—impacts the original Dune mythos. At best, it seems a harmless enterprise. Herbert and Anderson ingeniously and respectfully provide explanations for such questions as these: How did the trade in spice start? What are the origins of the Bene Gesserit? Who first rode a sandworm? And of course, the core issue, why are thinking machines forbidden in Paul Muad'Dib's time? It's amusing to see a reversal of Frank Herbert's original familial equation: Here the Harkonnen character is the hero and something of prig, while the Atreides character is on the side of the bad guys, and naively self-satisfied.
But even given all these frissons for the savvy reader, there remains a feeling of arbitrariness about the project. You cannot now go back to Frank Herbert's original books and say, "Ah, this character is plainly a reference to Selim Wormrider," simply because Frank Herbert had no knowledge of Selim. These books, entertaining as they might be, pile sand around the impenetrable dome of Frank Herbert's creation without ever breaching the walls of that opus.
