Dune: House Harkonnen

It's often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results.

When I read Dune: House Atreides by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, I was disappointed by a book that could in no way, shape, or form, even begin to slake the thirst that Frank Herbert's Dune books created. Brian and KJA gave us what you would expect from them: expository text that is at times insulting to the reader, stuffed to the gills with flowery prose (so you don't notice the smell), and an acute case of thesaurusitis.

So, I must have been insane, at least, temporarily, when I thought that House Harkonnen would be different. Were I the authors of this book, I would have followed that statement with a "It show more wasn't," because that's just what you can come to expect from the son of a great writer and a professional fan fiction author.

The only redeeming quality of this book is that you don't actually have to pay attention to what you're reading when you're reading. Any guns of Chekhov's that are seeded on page 10 don't need to be noticed by the reader, because before it's fired, you'll get reminded of its presence and told its significance, and why you should care.

In a few more years, I may give another non-Frank Dune book a shot, but in my sampling of the crap that these two jokers produced and are still producing (and surprisingly, people are still buying) there is no point in reading these books. The synopses of these books are better written, and cut out most of the fluffy fat that you can come to expect from these two "authors."

Highly unrecommended. show less

While the House Trilogy had a few nice scenes, it was an ultimately unneccessary trilogy which was only exacerbated by the fact that Brian and Kevon chose to write this and another McDune trilogy BEFORE they finally did Dune 7 (and what a HUGE disappointment that was!)

Baron Harkonnen is getting fatter and fatter and he hates it and it makes him mad at the Bene Gesserit. In the real Dune books, he isn't bothered by this and seems to enjoy it, so Brian and Kevin basically ruined it for us by retconning the character of Harkonnen to make him more pathetic and almost clownishly evil instead of the brilliant mastermind he was in the real Dune books. This is only one of many, many problems which plague the trilogy.

Leto's romance with Kailea show more and what ensues was just silly. In the Dune books, Ix wasn't ruled by a royal family. I did enjoy the intrigue of the Corrino royal family with what happened to Elrood, but there are very few enjoyable parts in this book and the other McDune books. Stick with the real Dune books by Frank Herbert. show less

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?

Interesting from the point of view of getting background on characters in Dune but the writing in places is somewhat stilted. I enjoyed reading it but would not recommend reading it to the casual reader.

Interesting book, with one big issue - a nice Harkonnen. This needs to be written in words of fire - HARKONNENS ARE BAD, THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BAD, THEY WILL ALWAYS BE BAD! So Abulard, the thoroughly nice but totally ineffectual half-brother of the Baron, ruined the book for me.

(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 show more 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. show less

There's no need to chastise Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson for not slavishly imitating the beloved original Dune novels — but couldn't they have peeled back the covers on Frank Herbert's grand mythic and ecologic themes, just a little bit? Instead we get gore, buckets of it. Alongside the gore the authors meticulously develop plots and counter-plots over hundreds of pages. Much of the royal intrigue is quite clever, but like the bloodshed, excessive.

Full review: http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/reviews/herbert.cfm