Tag: science fiction

I’m breaking my own self-imposed rule of not republishing a review of a bad book, but for a good reason: I used the review as an opportunity to say a few critical words about what I later called “series rot” and I wanted to share those words here.
The review was published in the Bulletin in 2009 and added to this site in 2024, unchanged except for this intro and some links.

The Winds of Dune

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Simon & Schuster, 2009

In the beginning was Dune, a brilliant book which quickly became, and remains, a science fiction classic. It fused Greek tragedy, space opera and (the most visionary innovation) planetary-scale ecology. Frank Herbert followed it with five sequels, none as good as the original although some came close, in the twenty years before his death. After Frank’s death, his son looked at his inheritance and saw possibilities for more stories from the Dune universe. He and Kevin Anderson, an undistinguished SF author, embarked on a series of extensions to the series: a pair of sequels, then two sets of three prequels.

After that, they turned to filling gaps in the original sequence: The Winds of Dune is (wait for it) an ‘interquel’ set between Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

‘plot’

Paul Muad’dib has just walked into the desert, apparently to his death, and Alia has become Regent for his infant twin children. Frank Herbert didn’t think this part of his history needed telling but Brian and Kevin do it in 250 pages, padded out with another 200 pages of flashbacks. The plot is simple: before he walked away, Paul entrusted a childhood friend with the task of undermining the dangerously messianic adulation he had attracted. The friend is hunted down on Alia’s orders because his propaganda undermines her own power base. The rest is internecine political skulduggery interspersed with brief, stereotyped, action-adventure episodes.

‘faithful to the original vision’

The writers have been excruciatingly ‘faithful to the original vision’. There is hardly a descriptive sentence which could not have been lifted from the original series, so there is no trace, perhaps no possibility, of character development. Characterisation was not a strength of the original series but these characters are not even cardboard, they are recycled cardboard – papier maché, perhaps. Ditto landscapes, ditto religions, ditto technologies.

Why should any of this matter enough to take up half a page of your newspaper? Simply because this sort of writing is now the norm, not the exception, in what used to be the liveliest field in fiction. Look at The Wheel of Time or Shannara. Look at anything by Feist, Lackey, Goodkind, Harding, Asher, Marillier or Peter Hamilton – trilogies, tetralogies, sequences of up to twenty books. (Yes, I know that list includes some Fantasy authors, but that’s because Fantasy suffers exactly the same problem.) Some of them, like Dune and The Dragons of Pern, started brilliantly and degenerated into self-pastiche but none of them now have an ideas-per-page rating greater than one star out of a possible ten. In a field which was all about ideas, that is appalling.

Science fiction used to be challenging and stimulating but is now, overwhelmingly, pap. Almost the surest sign that it is going to be pap is the length of the series. The surest? The original writer has taken on an assistant or co-writer to do the hack-work, or has left the scene completely for one reason or another. At that point, the series has become a franchise and the artistic vision, if it ever existed, has given way to painting by numbers.

‘excitement, passion and sense of the miraculous’

There may be many reasons for this state of affairs but ‘Readers like it’ is the commonest excuse. Whether readers like it for what it is or because they don’t know what they are missing, I’m sorry for them.

If the first reason applies, I’m disappointed that anyone can put such a low value on their leisure time. If the second reason is the real one, they need to look back to the classics – The Left Hand of Darkness, Stranger In a Strange Land, Ringworld, Dune itself – and then look for more recent books with the same excitement, passion and sense of the miraculous. Such books do exist. Look for anything by William Gibson, Ian McDonald, Neil Gaiman or Australia’s own Greg Egan. More to the present point, look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s great climate trilogy, which brings Frank Herbert’s ecological drama home to contemporary America.

The Winds of Dune is not the worst book of its kind but it is an absolutely typical example of the least imaginative kind of imaginative fiction.