Not trying to give a review of the book, mind, but I've begun reading Dune: House Atreides and it's "OK," so far, except that right out of the gate, I've noticed this tendency to repeat things several times on the same page. For example, "Through bribes and careful manipulation of the records, the Baron planned to control what the Emperor knew." "The Baron had no plans on telling the Emperor everything." "The Emperor would be kept from knowing everything, the Baron would see to it." Yes ... YES!!! ... yes, to the Baron not telling the Emperor everything. I GET that, alright? What ... are these two collaborating on this thing getting paid by the word, here, or what? Because I got it the first time, there's no need to type the shite every other paragraph. If I'm not sure about something, the words aren't moving off the page ... you know? I can recheck anything important, if I had to. It's just a very annoying tendency I'm noticing, here. Otherwise, I'm only, like ... 40 pages into it, so ...
That's typical of all of them. He "writes" his books by dictating them. That could mean while he's hiking up and down mountains (don't ask me how he does that - most people would need two hands to hold the hiking poles and one to hold the recorder), walking around somewhere else, and I read about a cruise he took with his wife... to Alaska, and he spent most of the time dictating books.
All that dicta-hiking means he's unable to just flip back a few pages or scroll back, to double check what he's written, and so there's a lot of repetition. His secretary transcribes what he's dictated, and it's not her place to point out that he's mentioned something five times in the last four pages.
Apparently Brian doesn't catch those repetitions, either, in their "brainstorming" sessions.
Pad the tome out with redundant crap - I assume that's KJA's writing style. Do we know that BH's name isn't there only for the association with his father?
I think it's safe to assume that anything in the nuDune novels that looks or feels like the Star Wars stuff written by KJA is very likely written by KJA. I haven't read any of the Star Wars novels that came out after the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies, and those were many years before the Expanded Universe books began. I did read part of the Mos Eisley Cantina anthology, and remember enjoying some of the stories. But that's all, and so I don't know enough to tell what KJA's Star Wars books are like.
My speculation is that whatever attempts at thoughtfulness or actual philosophy or discussion of
ideas are in the nuDune books are probably written by Brian. But there aren't many, so who knows? If I could ask them, I'd want to know which of them created the character of Griffen Harkonnen, in Sisterhood of Dune (I think that's the one he was in). I actually liked that character. Not that he was particularly nuanced, mind, but he was
likable.
All this said, of course having Brian Herbert's name on the books is a selling point. People get the idea that this whole thing went ahead with Frank Herbert's blessing, which is obviously absurd.
What is Dune's relationship to modern day Earth? So far the only references to Earth I've come across are in the wiki's article on the KJA/BH Butlerian Jihad.
Dune's relation to modern day Earth... well, for starters, toss out everything from nuDune. None of that is in keeping with what Frank Herbert wrote.
Earth is, of course, present in Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers' "Other Memory" (as they can access memories from the female side of their lineage). As Pre-Borns, Alia, Ghanima, and Leto II can also access their ancestral Other Memories, although it seems odd that Alia should be able to have any contact with the Baron. She was born a Reverend Mother, however, so maybe that mucked things up a bit - the fact that it occurred
in utero, rather than in a normal Water of Life ceremony.
The second appendix in
Dune makes it clear that Earth was still very much alive and not nuked, after the conclusion of the Butlerian Jihad. After the Jihad, it was necessary to reinforce the lessons that computers/AI were never to be allowed again, so it was included in the religious teachings that would become the new norm for the Imperium.
Appendix II: The Religion of Dune can be found on page 500 of the mass market paperback edition of Dune (give or take a few, according to whichever edition you own). It's plainly stated that the Commission of Ecumenical Translators (aka the C.E.T.) "convened on a neutral island of Old Earth, spawning ground of the mother religions." (p. 502)
This section goes on to say that the C.E.T. took longer to hammer out the new Orange Catholic Bible than expected, and some speculation went around that the Commissioners weren't in a hurry to conclude their work, because they were enjoying themselves, on that neutral island... which is revealed to have been Hawaii.
So... one of the obvious questions to ask KJA/BH (and which nuDune apologists found irritating) was "How could the C.E.T. have met on Hawaii after all life on Earth was obliterated by atomics, to revise the Orange Catholic Bible?"
You wouldn't believe some of the goofy excuses some people posted on the dunenovels.com forum. They demanded to know how we (the FH fans) knew it was Hawaii? Well, because Appendix II says so. So then they said, maybe the word "island" was metaphorical and really meant a space station in orbit around Earth.
Um... no. The Appendix couldn't have been any plainer. But the nuDune apologists kept on trying to make excuses, as to where this meeting took place. They just wouldn't accept that the nuking of Earth in nuDune had thoroughly messed up a critical part of the history of the Imperium, that which formally established the religious prohibition against thinking machines and would result in most of the people of the Imperium believing in this prohibition in their instinctive, gut-level reactions.
In the original version of the Dune universe, mankind has been colonising many thousands of other worlds for tens of thousands of years. Earth doesn't appear to hold any particular interest for most people and is almost mythical to many (probably due to society effectively being feudal with dissemination of knowledge seemingly restricted to the elite). In nuDune, Earth is rendered uninhabitable by atomic bombardment during the Butlerian Jihad.
NuDune aside (well aside), there's not much mention of Earth post-C.E.T. hammering out their new Orange Catholic Bible. The Dune Encyclopedia mentions Earth in the article about the journeys of the ZenSunni Wanderers; some of them were originally from Earth, and they and their descendants were sent from planet to planet, until some ended up on Dune and were expected to harvest spice. But that was thousands of years before the events of
Dune itself. By that time, only the Bene Gesserit and Leto II would have any kind of memories of Earth at all. It was a mere footnote in history to anyone else who knew about it... a passing fact that held no real relevance.
Put it this way: The date of Dune (10,191 AG, or After Guild) refers to how long it's been since the Butlerian Jihad, the forming of the Bene Gesserit/Mentats and the Spacing Guild establishing its monopoly on space travel. According to the Dune Encyclopedia, our present day Earth is about 14,000 years before that. (1945 AD = 14,255 BG, or Before Guild)
"One hundred and ten centuries" preceeded the Butlerian Jihad - according to Appendix II of Dune (p. 501). And that ended about a century before the founding of the Spacing Guild. So approximately 11,100 years from early space travel to Guild, and the events of Dune take place 10,191 years after that.
I at least enjoyed learning more about Leto.
Which Leto? There were three: Duke Leto Atreides, Leto (Paul and Chani's son who was killed by the Sardaukar), and Leto II (Paul and Chani's son who became the God-Emperor.
