Battle of Corrin

S

Shipgate

Rear Admiral
Picked this up the other day. I'm going to start it once I finish a different book I'm reading right now. I don't know if many of you are Dune fans. Dune is my favorite science fiction story of all time. I'm not a huge fan of these Butlerian Jihad novels, but they are still a fun read. There were lots of things that bothered me about The Machine Crusade but I won't go into it right now.

And so next year, they will release the first volume of Dune 7. That will be so strange. I don't know how I feel about it. I liked the way the sixth one ended. But it may be really good. Since Herbert did intend for their to be a seventh novel and the whole book is based on his outline of it and his notes.
 
I must wait 2 months to get Battle for Corrin, i liked the previous Legends of Dune books.
 
So far I liked the House Trilogy more than the Butlerian Jihad one. I was really enjoying the Butlerian trilogy until I finished Machine Crusade. And there were so many things that irratated me about it. Especially when Norma transforms herself into a tall beautiful women. I was like, "What the fuck?!"

But probably the biggest reason I don't like it as much is just because in the original Dune novels they only mentioned the Butlerian Jihad here and there. It was always so enticing to know that there was this history 10,000 years before where the human race was enslaved by "thinking machines". But the way they describe the machines in the prequels and their whole command structure and all that, it just wasn't how I pictured it in my mind.

I didn't like the conversations between Omnius and Erasmus. It's just hard to picture that these two machines would talk to one another in the way they do.

I did like the idea of the cymeks though. I actually found them quite disturbing. And it was pretty well explained how Xerxes gave the computer too much power and thus Omnius was born.

It really makes me wonder how much the Butlerian Jihad is based on Frank Herbert's notes on it. I don't think Herbert really wrote that much concerning that time period though. And maybe that's why I liked the House prequels more because they are largely based on Herbert's history and notes.
 
I haven't read The Battle of Corrin yet but I liked the first two and I could see both the Cymeks and something similar to the rise of Omnius possibly happening at some point in the future.
 
Altough the House Trilogy and the egends one are nice to read, the more i read them.... more i like the Dune Encyclopedia!
 
I really liked the House Trilogy. It added more substance to the characters in the first 3 books. I read those just after finishing Children of Dune, so everything was fresh in my memory. But after that, I was a little lost when I started to read GEoD. :eek:
I'm just beginning Heretics of Dune, so I'll have to wait a bit to read the Butlerian Jihad trilogy. Almost everywhere I read, people didn't like them very much.
Anyway, I always wondered if I was tagged by Echelon for ordering something on Amazon with the word Jihad in it? :D
 
God Emperor is a tad confusing at first when you're reading it. But it's because it's about 3000 something years ahead of Children of Dune. Everything is so foreign in it too it feels like. You've got the first three which all are in the same time period. Then the 4th which totally stands on its own weird time when spice is only given out in allowances by Leto II and Dune is a green watery planet. Then you've got the last three books after that which take place about 1500 years after God Emperor. Those last two written by Herbert are my favorite.

To think humanity could come so far in space and evolution. It's really exciting and disturbing to me. Reading it gave me the chills. And the scale of it is so huge. Once you realize the nature of the Scattering and just how vast it was. And the introduction of the Honored Matres in Heretics of Dune was really interesting especially once you realize how big their numbers are.

Then I was really blown away when I realized there was a much larger and mysterious force than the Honored Matres. They are to be revealed in Dune 7. I hope I haven't spoiled anything though. It doesn't seem like I have. As I've said before, I can talk about Dune easily for hours if I wanted to.
 
I've got to say, I didn't much care for the original series after Children of Dune. I thought the House trilogy was very good, especially the expanded role given to Count Fenring.
Haven't tried any of the Butlerian Jihad books, though I'm marking it for my next trip to the library now.
 
The last two books were Frank Herbert believing his own hype -- weird for the sake of weird and nothing else. Dune is fantastic, but it's not the amazing metaphor for anything that the usenet pleasures itself about constantly.
 
Frankly, the last couple of books were boring. Frank Herbert wasn't so much believing his own hype as he was milking a cash cow. Which I don't blame him for. If I could do it, I would. It just didn't feel like there was much to tie the last two books in with the first four. No characters are the same, except if you count the 80 millionth Duncan Idaho, and Herbert never fleshed out the universe enough to make me feel comfortable jumping a few thousand years ahead.
 
I guess that's what I liked about the last two books was that they didn't have all those characters from the first four. By the end of the fourth book, I was ready to move on past those characters and that whole timeline. I really don't think he was milking anything in my opinion. The biggest and most important thing he tied in with the last two books was the effect that Leto II's death had on the known universe. It caused a great famine due to the deprivation of spice. And then it made people scatter into unkown parts of the universe looking for new resources and ways of life. And all the last two books were were the the results of that Scattering.

Then you had the Honored Matres that originated from Leto's Fish Speaker army. And you're supposed to think at first that the only reason they came back to the Old Empire was to conquer the Bene Gesserit and take all their secrets and knowledge. But while that is part of their plan, the main reason was because they were being pursued out of the Scattering and back into the Old Empire by a much larger and mysterious force. And Dune 7 is going to reveal who that greater force is. From what I can tell, they are Face Dancers that became independent of their Tleilaxu masters.

Though I really do understand what you mean about him not fleshing out the universe more. Because so much had changed and he doesn't explain a lot of parts as I would have liked. Such as the Ixians coming up with machines that can calculate destinations through foldspace, which broke the whole Spacing Guild's monopoly on space travel. But because there are so many parts about the whole setting of the last two that you don't know about, I just think that's what I loved about it. How it feels so uncertain and so foreign.

There were a lot of things I just didn't get at first when reading the last two books especially. But I've read them all now at least twice and the last two are still my favorite ones.
 
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