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My Agony: A Review of "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad"
Jesus only hung on the cross for three days. I have read four hundred and fifty-four PAGES of "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad".
And I did it to save your soul.
When I was ten years old I was quite precocious. I read and loved Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and had a voracious appetite for new books. So I picked up Frank Herbert's Dune without a second thought.
I never saw it coming.
A hundred pages later I was startled to feel tears pouring down my young face; tears of pure frustration. The book was hard, too hard and complex for my ten-year-old mind to cope with. In a fit of fury, I threw the book across the room.
I hated Dune for years. Herbert, too. But my reading speed is way too fast, so by the time I was sixteen or so I couldn't avoid reading some other Herbert books. Not in the Dune series, of course - the memory of those tears still stung - but Whipping Star. It was also hard, quite complex, but not (I thought) as hard as Dune had been. It certainly made me think.
And more and more I came to realize that it was a damned impressive book, one worth reading again and again. The concepts were difficult to grasp, but each re-reading brought something new, a fuller understanding; and it was a really good book. So I looked up the sequel (also good, although not quite as endearing). I looked up other short stories that Herbert had set in the same universe. Excellent, and all too rare. From there it was natural to move into Herbert's other short science fiction; the early stuff was a little bit clunky and formulaic, but the later stories were masterful and quite deep.
And so of course I found myself moving, step by step, back to Dune.
And it was good.
Not perfect, but very very good indeed; it could easily even be called "great". Over the years my mind had developed enough to be able to take on Frank Herbert's vision and comprehend it. I went on to read all the books in the series, and while some of the later ones were uneven, I enjoyed them all.
Cut to 2003. I am desperately poor, struggling to pay the mortgage and support my family (including our toddler) on a single income. This is a deadly situation. Where once I went to Avenue Victor Hugo and other great used bookstores at least two or three times a week and bought a dozen books at a time, now I haven't picked up even ONE new book - new or used - in months.
Thank Shai-Halud for the public library! I hadn't been to the library in years, but I recently started taking Sebastian there on Saturday mornings. He loves it. While the Woonsocket library is comparatively small and poorly-stocked, it still has a number of books worth reading - and of course far more are available through inter-library loan.
Since I spend two hours a day on the train, I need lots of reading material...so I've been taking out a lot of books. I'll write about most of them later (note to myself: Paths of the Dead, Big Lies, The Skies of Pern, The Dreamthief's Daughter, The Skryling Tree, Brothers, The Little Engine That Could), but right now there's one that is crying, screaming, howling for treatment.
The Son Is Not The Father
Oh dear god. I cannot express the horror. The sheer...stupidity that is Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Frank Herbert wrote with incredible depth and complexity, giving hints of a world far deeper than the portion he showed in his books. It gave a feeling of magic, this sensation of thousands of years of unknown (and unknowable) history. At the same time he took bits of modern culture and altered them brilliantly.
I will be kind to Brian Herbert, Frank's son. His hands should not be cut off. He simply isn't a writer, and is cashing in on his famous father's talent. But he should never have been allowed to put his name on a book, particularly not a Dune book.
Good god, he sucks. The writing is dreadful; where his father's prose was complex, Brian's is not just simplistic, but downright childish - even moronic. Where Frank used hidden depths to intrigue and add luster, Brian has taken as many of those elements and simply ruined them, directly tying them to modern Earth issues and repeating them over and over. Frank had the gift of names, occasionally tying them in with ancient Earth history; Brian names ALL of his characters after famous historical figures from Earth history, for NO FUCKING REASON.
Ah yes. Over and over. The degree of repetition in this goddamned book is more extreme than anything I have ever seen in my life. EVERY point is hammered home with astonishingly dull and lifeless prose, and then repeated again every twenty pages or so. EVERY moral point is made so clear that a vegetable couldn't help but get it, and then repeated again a few dozen times.
The mighty robot Evil Badd entered the room. As he did, his mekkano-taste-probe tasted the brain of the baby human child he was gnawing on. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed tot had died in Evil Badd's cruel mekkano-claw with scarcely a whimper. The lovely human slave Beauty Goode looked up lifelessly at the entry of the mighty and evil robot.
"Ah-ha, Beauty Goode, I see you have awoken from what you humans call "unconsciousness", said Evil Badd. "I am Evil Badd, your new master. I am a robot. I like to eat babies. Some think that I am evil and bad. But I am a robot of pure logic."
"Yes, Master", said Beauty Goode submissively. Secretly she thought "I must find a way to resist the evil Evil Badd. He is evil, and that could be...bad!"
"Mind if I use your uterus as a bookmark, and eat your baby?" asked Evil Badd, ripping out Beauty Goode's uterus with his rapacious mekkano-claw.
Sorry to inflict that on you. But what you have just read is ONE THOUSAND TIMES BETTER than the 400+ pages of shit that I have had to wade through so far.
Ah, but nothing could prepare me for the horror of
3. 2. 4.
Page 324, real text this time:
[There has been a huge accident, and a number of slaves have been killed. The nobles look on at the carnage.]
"In a wry voice, Bludd said, "Not one of your most successful efforts, Tio."
"But you must admit, the concept shows promise, Lord Bludd. Look at the destructive potential," Holtzman said, looking at the unruffled nobles without even considering the dead and injured slaves. "We can be thankful that no one was hurt."
Okay. Now, apart from the fact that any book with a character named "Lord Bludd" should automatically earn the death penalty for its authors, please note that the authors nonetheless feel it necessary to point out the TOTALLY FUCKING OBVIOUS. "without even considering the dead and injured slaves" - gosh, thanks for pointing out that irony, because we readers are SO FUCKING STUPID that we'd have missed it, yes sirree bob!
I don't know if the authors assumed that the readers were total fucking morons, or if they're just so incredibly stupid themselves that they didn't realize that hammering the irony breaks it.
Enough. I've tortured myself enough with this piece of shit of a book. Let it be noted that some moron named Kevin J. Anderson co-wrote it, and that since he is NOT related to Frank Herbert, there is no reason that his hands shouldn't be cut off. Supposedly he has written 29 national bestsellers. If that's the case, it only justifies my belief that modern genre fiction is utter shit.
Speaking of which, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Oregonian, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly all apparently have had rave reviews of the new "Dune" books, according to excerpts printed on the back cover. Unless these have been taken wildly out of context or out-and-out fabricated, they merit the death penalty for every one of these publications and everyone associated with them. It need not be painful; I am not vengeful by nature. As long as they never kill a single tree or brain cell with their so-called "writing" ever again.
That is all.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2003-09-25 03:49 pm (UTC)(link)Nit-pick: Jesus was in the tomb for three days (not whole
days, but on three days depending on theological views). He was on the cross for a long while but died
before sundown.
Other than that, well, I probably won't be buying the
"Dune" sequals; I'm odd perhaps in that I'm not one
of the folk who feels that the original books were
wonderful in any event.
Actually...
We really should get you an online journal, Virg. I think I probably have some invite codes I can use, if AOL doesn't get its act together for you soon.