Two examples best illustrate the depth of intellectual and literary disappointment that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Dune: House Harkonnen (Bantam Books, $27.50 hardcover) delivers.
First, Count Hasimir Fenring just happens to collect artifacts from Old Terra. Second, the Swordsmasters of Ginaz just happen to dress their students in 18th-century musketeer outfits and hold forth on the samurai code.
Why is this a problem? According to
Dune, the history of the gigantic Imperium of the Padishah Emperors stretches back over 10,000 years.
And that's just the relatively recent past -- working from Herbert’s notes, Dr. Willis McNelly once compiled a chronology for his Dune Encyclopedia that set the birth of the Imperium a full 14,000 years from now. "Old Terra" is a world almost lost in the mists of time, removed from our era by 25,000 years and millions of worlds.
The curse of Dune: House Harkonnen is that Old Terra pops up on a regular basis, turning what could have been a worthy follow-up Herbert's original work into a derivative shadow of a classic of science fiction world-building.
Plot does matter
That’s especially true of the book’s plots and intrigues.
regularly give lip service to Dune’s legendary obsession with byzantine "wheels within wheels," but the characters’ "machiavellian" schemes are almost moronic.
At one point, Baron Harkonnen discovers that the Bene Gesserit have infected him with a nasty disease, and decides to take revenge. "A careful plan would be required," he thinks, "tricks within tricks."
However, it seems that the best he can think of is to travel to the Bene Gesserit homeworld to threaten the order directly. The Sisters then chase him off with a simple Jedi mind trick.
What happened to that careful plan, to tricks within tricks?
At least Herbert and Anderson are consistent. The Baron’s scheme is typical for House Harkonnen, which is filled with characters who lurch around being blindsided by each other’s half-baked plots. It is an Imperium of the brain-dead, a Dune for the simple-minded.
The whole thing would be laughable if it were not Dune, one of the greatest (and most beloved) works of cultural, political and historic extrapolation of our time -- and if Herbert and Anderson hadn’t been paid a million dollars to give it to us.
Sadly, this is Dune, and that million dollars could have paid the advances of a hundred new authors with something original to say.
An expanded version of this review will appear in the second issue of
