A few months ago I read Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson’s Sisterhood of Dune (you can read my review here). The sequel, Mentats of Dune (2014), continues the struggle between the various powers in the human Empire after the defeat of the thinking machines with the Butlerian Jihad.
With the anti-technology Butlerian forces of Manford Torondo growing in strength and influence, Prince Roderick Corrino sees a threat to the Imperial power of his brother, Emperor Salvador. Industrialist Josef Venport battles Manfred Torondo and his millions of believers, whose interference thwarts Venport’s business interests by restricting use of technology.
After the destruction of the Bene Gesserit school, Gilbertus Albans fears his Mentat School–training human computers–on Lampadas will be next. And Albans hides the secret copy of the thinking machine Erasmus that Torondo is obsessed with.
Although Brian Herbert & Anderson can’t match the baroque writing of Frank Hebert, they do manage to capture the complexity of the Dune world view. GRADE: B+
I’m tempted to give the Dune sequels another try.
We’d better start developing human computers fast. News story yesterday, computers are starting to talk to each other in a beep-blurp language they can understand but human’s can’t. At least Dave and Frank knew when HAL was up to no good.
Fred, DUNE in the 1960s hinted at the chilling affect Artificial Intelligence would have on the fate of humanity. The Mentats–human computers–are almost wiped out by the hatred of thinking machines.
Back in the Stone Age I read DUNE and enjoyed it (actually, I read the two serials in ANALOG that made up the first novel. I tried the next book in the series — it was called THE CASH COW OF DUNE ,or something like that — and discovered that finishing the book was like rising a bicycle to the center of the sun, a complete impossibility for mere mortal man. So I gave up on Herbert’s DUNE series. I also tried to read an (early non-DUNE) novel by Brian Herbert, and meh. Kevin J. Anderson has always been a hit-or-miss (mostly miss) author with me. It is not likely that I will read this, or any of the 123 (or so) DUNE sequels or prequels.
I’m an old fart set in my ways, and getting set-er every day.
Jerry, I cut Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson some slack with their DUNE series books. I have NAVIGATORS OF DUNE on my Read Real Soon stack. That’s the third book of this DUNE trilogy and I’m curious to see how all the disasters of SISTERHOOD OF DUNE and MENTATS OF DUNE turn out.