This is the second book in the “Legends of Dune” trilogy, detailing the story behind the Butlerian Jihad and the formation of the various guilds and organizations critical to the setting of the original Frank Herbert classics. With the Jihad underway, but the climactic Battle of Corrin still a book away, the authors were presented with quite a challenge.
I was fairly disappointed with the first novel, largely because of the inclusion of terms that were too “conventional” to fit within the Dune Universe. Those issues still remain, but having been established, there’s not much to be done about it. Omnius is still an incredibly bad name for the central power behind the “thinking machines”, a name Frank never would have used, and the less said about the cymeks, the better.
In fact, the scenes with the Titans and the “thinking machines” are the weakest material. In this case, it might have been better to portray the “thinking machines” as something a bit more vague and undefined. In other words, a “faceless enemy” of machines, rather than a group of cruel melodramatic villains posturing at every opportunity.
Granted, that is the difficulty with focusing on “enslaving thinking machines” (established in the original novels) as the enemy during the time of the Butlerian Jihad. How does one portray such a thing? How would billions of humans on thousands of worlds become slaves to “thinking machines”, and how would those machines interact and control humanity? The answer provided by the authors is understandable, if non-ideal. After all, why wouldn’t an artificial intelligence develop recognizable flaws like pride? (A more clinical and cold approach, however, might have worked better.)
Taking all of that into account, the bulk of the novel centers on the human characters and the details of the Jihad, and while some of those story choices don’t always work as well as the authors would hope, most of the material fits very well into the established Dune universe and feels like something Frank Herbert might have intended. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself accepting as much of the material as I was.
One item that I found hard to reconcile, however, was the transformation of Norma Cenva. While there are specific links made to the power of the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers, none of the original novels ever pointed to the possibility of such a substantial physical transformation. This is a minor moment in the story, but one with massive implications, and it simply doesn’t work within the context of the “Dune” mythos.
I also continue to have issues with the writing style. I’ve never liked books with numerous short chapters, because it breaks the rhythm of the story, at least in my opinion, and it’s clear that the result is a trend in the writing that becomes annoying over the span of 650 pages. Every new chapter recaps what happened before, sometimes in exactly the same language, advances the associated plot/character thread incrementally, and then hints at the next step in the same plot/character thread.
The result is somewhat shallow storytelling. The writers, by chopping up the story, continually feel the need to spell things out to the most obvious level. It’s one thing to do this for their own benefit, as scenes are written out of order and must later be assembled. It’s another to take what could be a subtle and intriguing 350 pages after editing and massaging and leave it a bloated, oversimplified brick saved by mostly solid ideas.
Rating: 7/10
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