I remember loving the original Dune but disliking the Dune series more with each new entry as it came out, and God-Emperor most of all. If I think about them at all, it is only the first one.
But I'm a sucker for the intellectual adventurousness of the group over at Astral Codex Ten, so when someone reviewed the final episode I read it anyway. He rereads it in the light of being suspicious of AI and its human/subhuman/superhuman mixture, which was not something I had considered.
Along the way, he throws in this line, which is a great summation of two other late and fairly irritating books in the series.
For the record, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune are about sexing uppity women into submission and discovering a literal secret clan of space Jews, respectively. They are not necessarily required Dune reading, but if you are specifically looking for late-career-author-weirdness, they are excellent.
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ReplyDeleteIt's been so long since I read the sequels that all I have left is a scene from 2 and 3 and GEOD, and a sense that re-reading the books to recover the forgotten bits would not be rewarding.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, I also read one of the prequels. It was imaginative, and illustrated and explained background in Dune, but there's something about writing prequels, especially explanatory prequels, that cramps the story. For all their failings, the sequels weren't cramped that way.