Rant: Dune 7&8... it burns. (Spoilers)

[Nephtys]

Okay, my brain burns from this. I've been listening to the Dune series and the 'new' ones that KJA/Brian Herbert have produced. At last, I have finished on a walk, listening to Dune 8: Sandworms of Dune.

And holy hell, it got worse.

Everyone made fun of how bad the 'House: (blah) Prequels' were when they came out. Then everyone stared at how bad became worse when the Butlerian Jihad books came out, revealing a cheesy Skynet-style Machine Evildooer as the villain.

It got so much worse. I'm going to do a public service by summarizing both plots, in cruel and extremely accurate detail.

---

A ship full of heroes escapes from the old empire on a cloaking ship, since the end of the last book that Frank Herbert wrote before he died. in They're being pursued by some kind of old man, and a woman who are farmers, and have some sort of intergalactic 'tachyon net'. Sure.

A bunch of nothing happens, before it's revealed that those two are really Omnius (AKA, Skynet) and Erasmus (AKA, Robo-Snydley Whiplash), the machine overlords from the butlerian Jihad prequels. To combat them, the crew of this ship clone copies of heroes from the first few done Books, like Paul Atreides, Jessica, Dr. Yeuh, Leto II, Stilgar, Liet Kynes and Alia Atreides.

The machines use their arcane 'mathematics' to somehow predict this scheme with probability. They clone a Baron Harkonnen to train an Evil Clone of Paul Atreides, since they want his powers as a Kwesachs Haderach.

Yeah. That's right. There's a good clone and evil clone. A bunch more useless stuff happens, and some Tleilaxu gene-splicers make sandworms that can swim in lakes. This plot point serves only to create a Holy Grail of Super Spice, and is afterwards forgotten. Oh, and Stilgar and Liet's clones do absolutely nothing of value and fade away into the background.

Eventually, the cloak ship gets captured. Good Paul has to knife-fight with Evil Paul, within an Evil City made of Evil Spikes. Good Paul is somewhat stabbed in the heart, and Evil Paul claims the holy grail of ultra spice. He chooses... poorly, and is put into a coma for all eternity. Good Paul meanwhile, gets better from being stabbed in the heart.

All is not well though! In the Empire, the Machine Fleet uses the 'Battlestar Galactica' hacking trick to fry out computers that are being used by the human defenders, turning off their ships. So overconfident, they don't even blow up any of the human ships as they fly by them. All seems lost, as the machines advance on important human worlds...

OH wait! Deus Ex Machina! Norma Cenva, the Mary-Sue character from the Butlerian Jihad prequels (who used to be ugly, unloved, but then became a beautiful shapeshifting sorceress goddess who invented FTL Travel, Spice, the Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and basically everything in the Universe...) comes along with her Time Ship and ascended powers, sweeping aside the Machine Fleet with a bunch of random Navigators guarding her. She then flies off to the Machine Capitol, where she sucks Evil Overlord Omnius into another dimension along with herself, where they fight for all eternity. Rather like how that episode of Stargate ended, where Anubis gets stuck fighting an Ascended Being for all eternity.

Good Paul then gets his powers back. But wait! He realizes that in the end, he's not really the Ubermensch Kweisachs Haderach. It was Duncan Idaho all along, the secondary character of the first book that made random appearances back ever sense! Who would have thought?

Now that someone's mentioned it, Duncan realizes he has godlike powers. He declares that he wants peace between humans and machines. But oh no! The Machine's Shapeshifter Allies are turning on them, and now poise to conquer the Universe! They all sudden fall dead, as the robot Erasmus turns them off with a mental kill-switch. All across the entire galaxy. oops.

Whatever. Duncan engages a mind-meld with the Robot Erasmus, by touching foreheads. Somehow, they exchange their knowledge, and Erasmus asks to be euthanized. Duncan turns off Erasmus, and goes then to use his control codes over the machines to usher in a new age of freedom and progress. All of the unsavory organizations (The Tleilaxu, traitorous Ixians and greedy guild) turn entirely good. The Ixians produce helpful technology. The guild becomes a humanitarian organization. The Tleilaxu promise to use their gene knowledge only for helping people and to no longer harvest women. The Bene-Gesserit Schism ends as everyone lives together in peace.

Clone Paul goes to snuggle up with his girlfriend, Clone Chani.

The end.

---

My brain still hurts from listening to what had to have been the worst, and yet most commercially successful non-religious example of cheap internet-grade fanfiction in the history of mankind.

Thank you very much. I had to get that horrible burden off of me.

[Imperial Overlord]

Good God, if it wasn't written by KJA I wouldn't believe that it was possible for a book that shitty to be written.

*hugs Nephtys* Now just relax. The hurting will soon stop. *Injects her with poison*

It's the only humanitarian thing to do in this situation.

[LadyTevar]

What. The Fuck.

WHAT.... the FUCK....

Oh for Petessake, can we BURN KJA and Herbert already for this steaming pile of horseshit?

[LadyTevar]

Good God, if it wasn't written by KJA I wouldn't believe that it was possible for a book that shitty to be written.

*hugs Nephtys* Now just relax. The hurting will soon stop. *Injects her with poison*

It's the only humanitarian thing to do in this situation.

*prays for Neph's immortal soul, that she might be dipped into the River of Lethe and relieved of the horrid memories.*

[Pelranius]

I would like nothing better than to shove KJA and Herbert junior into the Eye of Terror.

This is the Battlefield Earth of sci fi novels, evidently.

[Typhonis 1]

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Thank Heavens I quit reading the Dune books after the first Butlerian Jihad book........


Naw don`t burn em.Put them too work. I`m certain KJA and Brian Herbert could mine salt....the old fashioned way.

[Duckie]

Wow, did Brian Hebert's father neglect him that much?

Making the old man into Omnius, the Evil Machine Overlord is rather blatant, given that the old man and the old woman in the final book were quite obviously Hebert and his wife.

There are other ways this book shits on every other piece of significance in the canonical books- Paul as the Kweisatz Haderach, the decline of the noble sandworm as Dune was terraformed (really a symbol of invasive species in reverse and the need of mankind to fuck with environments to the detriment of their inhabitants), the Mentat as a predictive agent and not a computer, the Tleilaxu as fundamentalist islam, etcetera...

OW. FUCK.

My brain.

Dune and its sequels (especially the last 2) wasn't perfect, but KJA and Hebert The Lesser have tried their hardest to make it seem so.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

If I didn't know any better, I'd say it sounds like a joke summary Nephtys made up just to pull the wool and let us all have a laugh.

Sadly, I do know better.

So basically, all they did was use the "Dune 7&8 sequels" idea as an excuse to make sequels of their Butlerian Jihad books?

*goes off and hugs copy of The Dune Encyclopedia*

[Master_Baerne]

Good Paul then gets his powers back. But wait! He realizes that in the end, he's not really the Ubermensch Kweisachs Haderach. It was Duncan Idaho all along, the secondary character of the first book that made random appearances back ever sense! Who would have thought?

What. The. Fuck. Only someone as brainless as KJA could possibly come up with this idiotic. Duncan's only appearance in the first book is do Die Valiantly. He is the ressurected as a ghola to please the Emperor Paul. That's it. Nothing else. No Spice Super Powers until the last two books, after his genes are screwed with by the Tleiaxu, he has metaphysical sex with an Honored Matre, and recovers the past 3000+ years of ghola lives.

[The Grim Squeaker]

... Excuse me, I think I need to lie down and get money for a visit to an euthanasia booth.

Amazingly enough, you're saying that Book 8 is even worse than 7? Well, it suits the pattern, the first batch of sequels were reasonably good (If not compared to the original Dune & co) then the sequels exponentially got worse leading to this... Abomination. (And not in the cool "Baby all-knowing" sense).

Frank must be asking Tolkien what was it that he did so wrong by leaving his legacy to such a hack

[Nephtys]

... Excuse me, I think I need to lie down and get money for a visit to an euthanasia booth.

Amazingly enough, you're saying that Book 8 is even worse than 7? Well, it suits the pattern, the first batch of sequels were reasonably good (If not compared to the original Dune & co) then the sequels exponentially got worse leading to this... Abomination. (And not in the cool "Baby all-knowing" sense).

Frank must be asking Tolkien what was it that he did so wrong by leaving his legacy to such a hack

Seriously? 7 makes the Butlerian Jihad look like a sci-fi classic. 8 makes 7 look like a summer blockbuster script.

It just goes so much down hill. The House (name) Prequels were *almost* as good as the worst Herbert ones. The twist of Idaho being God was just too much. As was Norma Cenva's return as Mary sue Queen of the Goddessdamned Universe.

It's like if there was a 4th book of Lord of the Rings, where Boromir's ressurected spirit goes to the far away lands on a blimp to get Frodo so that they could reassemble the fellowship 30 years later, to stop an evil Frodo that went back in time to steal the ring from himself, only to reveal that the most important person in the history of the universe was Tom Bombadil, who secretly was behind everything.

But back to Norma Cenva... I hate her guts. She's the biggest Mary Sue character I've ever seen. She makes Honor Harrington look completely unaccomplished as a Mary Sue. That's saying a damned lot.

[Lord Pounder]

I had been considering buying these books. Just out of morbid curriosity. Thanks for saving me the effort. I will instead do something more entertaing and spend the next 36 hours attempting to lick my eyebrow.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I am just barely starting to read, but I guess I should remind myself that this is only a book.

Only a book.

*cries*

[white_rabbit]

fucking OW!


The worst part of this is that by the looks of it, theres a plot hook for Omnius to return from this extradimensional prison thingy for yet more violation of Frank Herberts corpse.

[Lord Poe]

What. The Fuck.

WHAT.... the FUCK....

Oh for Petessake, can we BURN KJA and Herbert already for this steaming pile of horseshit?

Stop RIGHT THERE. Or, you'll be labeled a "Talifan."

[J]

I think you forgot about the best part, and that would be gratuitous rampaging sandworms on the Machine Planet, led by a clone of Leto II. Followed by Leto II choosing to be eaten by the sandworms and thus becoming one with them again, or something.

The entire book was an exercise in writing pointless disconnected action scenes, nothing really ties together like it does in Frank Herbert's novels. I can't believe I wasted a library loan to read this dreck.

[Archon]

I bought this thing before a flight to Toronto. Needless to say, it was the worst flight ever.

[Ghost Rider]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Poor trees and the lives they've given up for this crap to be printed. Truly this makes the SW EU and ST EU read like masterpiece epics.

[Lone_Prodigy]

Ah, yes, the book where creatures to whom water is incredibly toxic are "genetically engineered" to live in it?

[Frank Hipper]

I made a joke once that Dune 7 would be titled "Bene Gesserit Academy"; that would have been a monstrous improvement over this shit.

It's a calculated insult to Dune fans, I can't imagine any other excuse.

I expected something exquisitely painful, but sweet bouncing buttfucked baby Jesus, not anything this bad!

[Darth Holbytlan]

To combat them, the crew of this ship clone copies of heroes from the first few done Books, like Paul Atreides, Jessica, Dr. Yeuh, Leto II, Stilgar, Liet Kynes and Alia Atreides.

They clone a Baron Harkonnen to train an Evil Clone of Paul Atreides, since they want his powers as a Kwesachs Haderach.

Haven't these authors ever thought of creating their own characters?

Norma Cenva, the Mary-Sue character from the Butlerian Jihad prequels (who used to be ugly, unloved, but then became a beautiful shapeshifting sorceress goddess who invented FTL Travel, Spice, the Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and basically everything in the Universe...) comes along with her Time Ship and ascended powers, sweeping aside the Machine Fleet with a bunch of random Navigators guarding her.

Um, never mind. Forget I said anything...

It's like if there was a 4th book of Lord of the Rings, where Boromir's ressurected spirit goes to the far away lands on a blimp to get Frodo so that they could reassemble the fellowship 30 years later, to stop an evil Frodo that went back in time to steal the ring from himself, only to reveal that the most important person in the history of the universe was Tom Bombadil, who secretly was behind everything.

You might not be aware of some of the theories about Tom Bombadil. Yes, that he is the Creator Himself has been suggested.

[Pelranius]

Frank Herbert, if given the basic outline of the Pinky and Brain shit (that's a term circulating around for KJA and junior, guess who's the short albino rodent with an oversized cranium) would at least make it worth reading through his execution.

Well Pinky and Brain would fuck up Dune if they had to hash out a basic outline of the book.

Granted, their ideas are supershadow level stupid, but their execution is the crime that makes the death penalty automatic. I was annoyed by the inane plot devices, coincidences, prose and generally everything about the House prequels. I stopped after going a third through the Butlerian Jihad.

[Civil War Man]

You might not be aware of some of the theories about Tom Bombadil. Yes, that he is the Creator Himself has been suggested.

The difference with Bombadil is that, even if he were an incarnation of Iluvatar, he took a strict non-interventionist policy with regards to the events of Middle Earth. As Nephtys described Norma Cenva's appearance, it would be akin to Bombadil suddenly appearing at the fields of Pelennor and resurrecting Theoden or showing up at Mount Doom and helping Frodo destroy the Ring.

[Nephtys]

You might not be aware of some of the theories about Tom Bombadil. Yes, that he is the Creator Himself has been suggested.

The difference with Bombadil is that, even if he were an incarnation of Iluvatar, he took a strict non-interventionist policy with regards to the events of Middle Earth. As Nephtys described Norma Cenva's appearance, it would be akin to Bombadil suddenly appearing at the fields of Pelennor and resurrecting Theoden or showing up at Mount Doom and helping Frodo destroy the Ring.

It'd be more like.. Sauron personally has Frodo at sword-point, and is about to kill him and take the ring. when out of the sky, Bombadil tackles him, and self-destructs.

Then it's revealed that all along, Pippin had the inner strength and will to make good use of the Ring to help all of Middle Earth without corruption. Pippin gets the ring, only after he has a nice chat with Saruman who asks to be put down because he's tired of being evil. It's literally that... insane.

Okay. I'm still reeling. It's been days, and I /can not/ get over how awfully it was written. I'm hardly a dune fan either. I liked the first book, and it went downhill since. But I mean, like.. wow. Screw you all conventions of good storytelling.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

It'd be more like.. Sauron personally has Frodo at sword-point, and is about to kill him and take the ring. when out of the sky, Bombadil tackles him, and self-destructs.

Then it's revealed that all along, Pippin had the inner strength and will to make good use of the Ring to help all of Middle Earth without corruption. Pippin gets the ring, only after he has a nice chat with Saruman who asks to be put down because he's tired of being evil. It's literally that... insane.

And at the very end of the book, Sam is reunited with Bill the pony.