House Harkonnen (2000)

If you’ve read my review of House Atreides, then you’ve pretty much read my review of House Harkonnen. Herbert and Anderson haven’t changed much from one book to the next. How regrettable.

One difference is a glaring one, and it is annoying as hell: The authors feel the need to constantly remind the reader of everything that happened in the preceding book. Everything. And its not done with subtlety, either; out of nowhere, they retell the plot of the first book in a journalistic style. Then 100 pages later, they rehash the exact same story. This might be fine if the audience was grade school kids who may get lost with the plot in such massive volumes, but I think this idea would be selling children short.

The plot of House Harkonnen didn’t seem as interesting as its predecessor’s did. My greatest fear concerning its story is that I know it will all be rehashed in House Corrino. As I’m sure House Atreides will be as well. It makes me wonder if they’ll even be a story in House Corrino, or will it be like one of those cheap flashback episodes far too many television shows have used over the years?

Surprisingly, I still have great hopes for Frank Herbert’s Dune and I am anxious to read this science-fiction great. Unfortunately, I have not an iota of faith in Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson’s collaboration. ( )

I was very disappointed with this one. After how good the previous book was, I found it disconcerting we had so many extra plot lines for no reason, along with every scene involving the Harkonnen's being terrible, bordering on ridiculous. The only bright side to this book was further development for Duncan Idaho and Leto Atreides, who continued to be interesting. I hope the characters are handled better in the final book of the trilogy. ( )

I got a hundred pages in before saying to myself, "What was I thinking?" Brian Herbert's half (what there was of it that was detectable; I severely suspect that the only reason his name is on the dust jacket was for marketing purposes) barely covers up the stink of Kevin Anderson's goopy, vapid, deliberate "prose."Contrary to the reviewer's blurbs, this cash cow in the shape of a book is painfully contrived, insultingly predictable, and completely not in the spirit of Dune.Dropped it like it was hot and didn't finish it. Why bother? ( )

The three books are okay to read, definately a must for Dune fans. I read them before rereading the original Dune novel, and while reading the books, I couldn't wait to start reading Dune. Great as an appetizer! ( )

(Note - I have not read other Dune prequels than this one.)

I'd had this book sitting in my bookshelf for a couple of years now, but hadn't previously gotten past the first page. I originally picked it up despite some misgivings - one of the two authors was Kevin J. Anderson, widely reviled for having written some of the most mediocre and uninteresting additions to the Star Wars universe. Still, it was a cheap paperback and I've always loved reading about the bad guys (who hasn't?), so I ended up buying the thing. But then I never got around reading it, partly because of my distrust towards the author, partly because the first couple of pages started off with such an uninteresting scene. But I finally got around reading it last weekend.

Unlike you'd assume from the title, it doesn't really concentrate on the Harkonnens. While they certainly do get a respectable amount of attention, the Atreides get as much if not more, and the same goes for a couple of unaffiliated characters. I found the structure of the book to be interesting: the chapters were all pretty short, averaging maybe 5-10 pages each, giving a tensely packed share of one character's doings and then switching to another in the next chapter. While this helped keep the pace fast and the book easy to read, I found that the atmosphere suffered somewhat. I simply didn't have the time to get emotionally involved in each scene before it already switched to the next.

From a book named "House Harkonnen", I'd have expected it to deepen the personalities of the Harkonnen characters, tell us more about their house and the society of the planets they ruled, and so on. Not so. Over on tvtropes.org, there's a trope called Kick the Dog. It's that moment where an author wants to make it obvious to even the most dim-witted reader that his villain is really evil, and has the character do something blatantly cold and cruel, like kicking an innocent dog for no reason. With the exception of one character - who's viewed as an incompetent black sheep by the others, and who eventually ends up annoying even the reader for his repeated inability to look enough ahead - Kick the Dog moments are the only kind of scenes that the Harkonnen characters seem to get in the book. They get absolutely no character development of any kind, and seem more like caricatures than real people. By the time you get to the last pages, Vladimir Harkonnen's habit of executing anybody who fails him - whether by their own fault or not - has reached such exaggareted proportions that you feel more like you were watching a children's comic with a cardboard villain than reading a serious book.

The book also has the general problem that prequels easily have - you know how things will be by the time of the original series, and thus you know what world-changing plans are doomed to fail. Throughout the book, there are plans that can't succeed, characters that have to die, events that must come to nothing. At one point, a character has a ploy for assassinating both the Emperor and his whole family, an event that would be so cataclysmic and wide-reaching that you're rooting him to succeed just so you'd get to see the consequences - but then you also know that he simply cannot succeed, no matter what. It's all quite frustrating: a good prequel could give entirely new twists to what you thought you knew, giving an entire new dimension to the events in the original books. House Harkonnen does none of that - it takes tidbits mentioned in the original books and expands on them, but not enough to make them really interesting, not adding anything on them that we couldn't have easily imagined from their original description. To top it off, some of the events by which such loose threads are terminated feel all too convenient and contrived.

Despite all of this, there's something odd in the book that kept me turning the pages and wouldn't easily allow me to put it down after having started reading it. It feels a bit like the Harry Potter books - you know their literary merits aren't all that special, but you still have to keep reading. (Though I'd note that the HP books are better than this book.) Regardless of all the flaws, I'd still give it four stars out of five - simply because any 700+ page book that's good enough for me to finish in about five days deserves that amount. ( )